Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 45

[This is the home stretch, designer; you're falling way behind on the comparatively simple task of playing and beating high quality games there, bucko...]

    If there was ever any doubt about what an awful game journalist I'd theoretically be, this project has dispelled it. My personal gaming habit of flitting about from title to title, playing enough to feel like the design shape of them is clear; that's about as far from knuckling down and digesting the content as butterflies are from locusts. This has been a very thorough education in how multiple UFO 50 reviews can simultaneously contain quips about it being "a terrible review experience" and also lines referring to the game being "a joy to play."

Turning exploring the collection into a job or task is like tunneling one layer deeper into the dreamscape, where the application of my own "design research pollinator" pattern feels inadequate when applied recursively, not to mention every time it bumps up against my natural inclination to simply check out the latest indie horror release or narrative experiment on release. I'm no stranger to having an infinite backlog, but taking even short breaks from this project to play Mouthwashing or Neva has turned some amazing games into proverbial boogeymen haunting my progress.

I can't really blame my broken sleep schedule on "Fifty Days" of course; it's been thoroughly busted for decades now, but all the UFO 50 combined with vague, "what am I gonna write about?" stress has resulted in a lot of really weird dreams of late...

Maxi & Min-Min

    This was a sequel to Mini & Max that I'm not sure I was playing or developing. It doesn't make sense that I would be living it either, since it starred a different girl named Maxine and her "cat" Min-Min. The scare quotes are there because while the inversion of pets from a dog to a cat makes real world sense with the way the title was flipped, I'm pretty sure this rotund shape-shifting feline character was secretly a tanuki that identifies as a cat in dream logic?

The mechanics too were a complete inversion of the first game; it was like some near-impossible combination of Rampage and Katamari Damacy about growing larger and larger to escape the Earth...

Inappropriate Content Nightmare

    I was working on a very similar collection of retro-style games, but it's not clear whether my coworkers were the actual UFO Recovery Team or others following in their footsteps. The amount of autonomy each of us had in development was such that content review conference calls were surprising showcases of things collaborators had no idea were in the game yet.

During one of these meetings, a game set in a very Rail Heist/Grimstone-like "Lonestar" setting was suddenly revealed to contain a horrible pixel art sexual assault like something out of Custer's Revenge on the Atari 2600! I'd never seen it before, and no one would volunteer information on how this had been created or who checked it in, but somehow it was determined that I was responsible for its addition as the design lead on that title.
I was in the process of removing my name from the credits and resigning when I woke up in a cold sweat...

Unnamed Urban Yokai Game

    This is the most recent UFO 50 dream I've got jotted down. I'm guessing Ghostwire Tokyo being free-to-claim on the Epic Store recently is the root cause; while I was playing that game, all I did was complain about the enemy diversity, whine about repetitive tengu audio, or theorize that the open world formula was a bad fit for the type of spooky linear set pieces Tango Gameworks was clearly great at...
But, in hindsight, Ghostwire clearly made a large impression on me in spite of all the little shortcomings.

I dreamt I was playing an 8-bit-looking top down stealth game in an urban Japanese setting; it felt a little like if Fear & Hunger was outside of the RPG-Maker engine with non-tile-based, eight-way movement where the objective was to sneak past various yokai and malevolent spirits. Items like prayer strips and salt packets could be used to stun or limit the movement of enemies, but rarely was it possible to defeat or remove them entirely.
Entering a building transitioned into what amounted to a 16-bit fidelity take on UFO 50's Night Manor, with a point-and click interface and adventure game puzzles to obtain key items and tools for advancing on the top-down overworld. I can't remember if it had any of those monster chase/hide mechanics though.

I think you woke up in an apartment or hospital with no idea why the world was overtaken with Eastern horror tropes, and the overarching objective was to make your way out of the city and into the countryside for answers. I didn't make it all the way through the game in dream terms, but it seemed like you were supposed to get up into the mountains and find some old village shrine that might've been the source of the universal haunting...

[This is customarily the point where you get frustrated and fascinated with yourself in equal measure  for essentially forwarding yourself messy video game elevator pitches in your sleep.]

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