UFO50 Poll and Discussion!

went for night manor

i started Night Manor the other night. so good. but also low key stressful. the whole mechanic with the monster is really great - i kind of wish more games were like this, even RPGs like Witcher 3. I remember the first time I played that game and realised "Huh, I can just poke about in this evil witch's house as long as I like? She's not going to come home and find me?" Whereas here you just never know when the monster is going to catch you. So good

I've not played all of these yet. Still scratching the surface. So far I'd probably vote for Mortol, which is like if the first Super Mario game was really hard and was more like Lemmings

mini & max is probably still it, insane scope for a game that exists in this project. porgy is my other favorite, gets at incredible atmosphere within the restrictions they're working with. night manor too

I still haven't played all of them all the way through but I love Rock-On Island. Party House is great too.

It's wild how many of these I still haven't played. Of the ones I have played, Bug Hunter, Mortol, and Pingolf are my faves. Also dug Camouflage quite a bit. I tend to enjoy the thinkier games.

xps I don't find Mortol to be much like SMB aside from being a side-scrolling platformer. It's so much more of a puzzle game, and your guys don't move in Mario-ish ways at all.

Still hoping this comes to PS5.

Booted up Mini & Max and lost a whole 90 minutes of my evening. So good.

I tried riding a butterfly to the door knob, and managed to land on it. But I couldn't find a way to enter it or interact with it.

I'll have to jump back in, can't remember the names of the ones I liked.

The clicker type one where you had to bash the crystal thing to get your payment, and then buy stuff and go off and explore some harsh land to get more stuff, and just basically keep progressing. It's very addictive but I did hit a barrier before finishing it.

that's Pilot Quest

yeah it is!

i love point and click adventure games and horror movies so it's going to be tough for anything to surpass night manor, but i still haven't opened all the games yet (i already beat night manor though lol). i didn't have an 8-bit console as a kid so i have less built-in nostalgia for the aesthetic but i like that a lot of these are puzzle games disguised as action games. rail heist is a good one in that vein that hasn't been mentioned yet. i just started playing grimstone which seems like a western rpg but has angels and weird gods and you use teeth as currency.

Night Manor really is special in that it manages to conjure up a whole vibe so effortlessly - a vibe i continue to think about hours after playing the game. I like Blue Prince, and this has a similar feel, but with horror instead of puzzles.

fuck, mini and max might be better than night manor. there’s so much to discover.

Feels a bit of a cheat to go for the first one, but Barbuta. Nothing else felt so much like playing a great Commodore 64 game that I had missed as a child.

I also loved Ninpek, Mortol (the Lemmings 2 style carrying forward of survivors is a great choice), Mooncat, Waldorf's Journey, Party House

I've had this collection a few weeks and I still havent checked out enough of the games to make a good call on it. Reason being the games are so good I am just happy to play Mortol for a couple of hours without feeling like I need to try the rest out.

So for now I shall vote Mortol. There doesn't seem to be anything random about it - every moment feels like it's been thought through properly and the challenge slowly increases as it goes along. It has that Dark Souls feeling where you know you're going to die a lot but that's part of the experience - you just try again until you get it nailed

The one I keep coming back to is Party House. What an addictive little game. I heard that it had one of the longest development times of all the games. It has a level of polish that many others are lacking.

Other favorites: Mortol 1 and 2, Avianos, Grimstone, the cryptic Petter trilogy (Barbuta, Mooncat, Divers). I recently realized there's a joke with Porgy and Divers: Porgy starts you in the shallow end, both literally and in giving plenty of instructions. Divers drops you right in the deep end, no bottom in sight and no instructions.

I'd like to come back to Lords of Diskonia and Valbrace. They're longer games I didn't have the patience when first playing the set.

There are some lesser games in the collection. Planet Zoldath is pretty terrible. I beat Big Bell Race in under 15 minutes. Quibble Race is based on an old flash game that wasn't worth bringing back. Combatants is intentionally bad.

i think the joke with Big Bell Race is that it's a cheap asset flip game of Campanella. but yeah they could have at least made some more tracks / obstacles

i found Planet Zoldath charming but it feels placed too late in the chronology even at #8, it should be 2 or 3.

man am I really the only Bug Hunter stan in these parts?

party house is very addictive but i find it impossible to win? i've come temptingly close though

i remember finding the first scenario the hardest of the 5 if that's what you're doing

I think Party House is the only one of these games that I have won

The first Party House scenario can't be cheesed out. Try one with cheerleaders and either athletes or bbqers.

1. mini & max
2. party house

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

1. mini & max
2. party house

― ufo, Saturday, 24 January 2026 04:46 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Freakin out

Just had a go at mini & max to see what the fuss is all about. whoa that one's great, and reminds me of Robocod

I liked it but I got a bit stuck. I got as far as the doorknob by flying across on a butterfly but didn't know how to open it

i'll see how far i get

Party House on the other hand. No, not for me.

if you don't see what's on the doorknob then you don't have the powers you need yet to see what's on the doorknob, try looking for missions/tasks to accomplish in the world first

voted mini & max, it just blew my mind with the iteration of the theme and how it's really more of an adventure game than a platformer (despite being styled as a platformer)

well maybe "blew my mind" is an exaggeration but it went deeper then i realized at first

currently playing Valbrace, which is a whole Dark Souls dungeon crawler...

Valbrace is cool but I couldn't get into the Punch-Out style combat.

Another underappreciated gem I want to shout out: Rail Heist!

Completed Night Manor the other night. How can something so simplistic-looking haunt my dreams like that? The tone and everything is so good. The only problem with it is that the masked killer becomes more of a nuisance than anything else by the second part of the game. Apparently there's a special ending if you manage to solve the mystery without getting caught by him though.