Still playing UFO 50, just cleared Porgy (1986) and have mixed thoughts (pretty much the standard criticisms if you look up what people are saying) but there's a couple things that I really, really like about it.
First, the growing tonal dissonance between its saccharine "non-violent" framing, versus the mechanics and the atmosphere as you progress deeper. It really captures the sense of "wow you really didn't think about the implications here" that comes so often when gamedevs try to soften the edges of the violence inherent to the idiom they chose to work in. In this case, you're a marine biologist who goes around unleashing a constant barrage "stun torpedoes" that "pacify" wildlife, resulting in blue totally-not-ghosts that in the vast majority of cases are completely unrelated to the species you just "pacified." It's especially dark in light of the fact that the most common method of stunning marine life is dynamite fishing. Given that the dev team includes Derek Yu (I'm O.K., Spelunky) and Eirik Suhrke (contributed to Hotline Miami) it's pretty clearly deliberate, yet they managed to keep it from feeling cynical.
Second, the atmosphere is genuinely awesome. You're gonna have to take my word on this but the way it shifts from "placid" to "haunting" to "intense" is really really satisfying.
Third, I absolutely eat up all the anachronisms in UFO 50 and Porgy feels the most pointedly anachronistic to me so far. Other games have a much longer time gap (eg Bug Hunter (1983) being derived from Into The Breach (2018)) but it's easier to suspend disbelief that some unknown devs innovated in game design long before anyone else did, than that a story pointedly addresses a subject that hadn't reached the public zeitgeist yet. Captain Planet-style heavy-handed "save-the-earth" environmental themes hit the mainstream in 1990 (and carried on for a couple of years; Fern Gully (1992) was a fairly late entry in that fad), four years after Porgy (1986) was notionally released. Global warming wouldn't come up until later still. (side note: environmental themes didn't go away, but after the early 90s fad they were handled with more subtlety, as in Final Fantasy VII (1997) and Abe's Oddysee (1997). Yes, those are subtle treatments of environmental themes, compared to crying monkeys and literal invocations of an anthropomorphic Gaia).
More anachronisms include how the gameplay loop is basically the same as RE1 and other horror games, and how other than the 2-button controls and per-sprite palette restrictions, it feels way more like a late SNES game than anything that could even run on NES-equivalent hardware, let alone a game from 1986. It's especially jarring compared to Rock On! Island (1987), which *does* look like an NES game. Also the way the submarine has what I call "Amiga Eyes," which I associate with the early 90s.
Anyway UFO 50 is solid if you like retro games generally, absolutely *incredible* if you like getting meta with it and diving deep into themes and game design.
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