Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 30

 


   It's really hard to overstate just how impressive Mini & Max is in the context of the collection. If you dropped the majority of the UFO 50 games onto itch.io individually, they'd sell pretty well as retro indie projects that prove out a novel set of ideas. Mini & Max stands alongside a handful of others that would cause the comment sections on there to blow up with lots of "Steam release when?" and "You should release this on Switch, more people should know about it!"

[This would normally be where you'd go on about how we need to support more platforms and storefronts for the future health of the industry, but it sounds like you might be willing to behave for once...]

The whole "enemies as platforms" foundation is great for adventure game patterns, since stomping enemies is traditionally an interaction with a single output, (dealing damage). Letting the player ride most enemies trades some of that kinetic, combative platforming feel for a ton of interactivity; is the enemy now just a platform? If so what's their movement pattern now that you're on them? What if some other input allowed you limited command over them, like tugging on their metaphorical reins? Grab them from above and that modal state can lead to all sorts of shenanigans. You can use enemies like weapons, keys, inventory items, you name it.
The fact that this fantastic move set and possibility space has a bunch of upgrades to find that make it even easier to do what you want makes me feel like I'm playing around in an alternate dimension where A Boy and His Blob really took off or something. Where the LucasArts juice got slurped up by more platformers and licensed games like Monster in my Pocket put puzzles and exploration ahead of combat. There's a key pivot on the collect-a-thon formula in sight here that really should have been applied to everything from The Addams Family to Bratz over the last few decades.

(February, 1989) "One of our largest games to date, it pays homage to several UFO Soft titles that precede it."

The history tab doesn't lie, the main theme of Mini & Max is scale. Both in the sense that the narrative and themes are all about changing sizes, but also time scales and expectations. If you'd told me that a 2D platforming adventure with pixel art was going to pull off a similar trick to Elden Ring's map zooming out even further, I'd have been pretty skeptical!

The aforementioned connections to other games in the collection are also delightful to discover and identify. My favorite so far is the time travelling mold god from Night Manor, here to ensure their fungal people develop the intelligence to eventually take over human hosts and kick off that nightmare...

[<= Day 29] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 31 =>]

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