Everything is kinda shitty and stressful right now, so here's a little look at something that's neither.

I wasn't allowed to have videogames when I was a kid, so I chose my friends based in part on who had a game system at home. Alan had an Atari and a pile of games. Geoff had an Apple II and Kareteka. A kid who moved out of town in third grade had an Intellivision, with its one-of-a-kind dial controllers. A few years later, a younger cousin got a Super Nintendo and getting a babysitting job over there meant getting to play Zelda. I didn't get my own game system until I moved out at 17 and bought a Sega Genesis and lost hours to Sonic's quest for golden rings.

UFO 50's throwback title screen.

This is a long way to say that the 8 bit nostalgia that runs through UFO 50—a new, mindblowing, indie game that came out on Steam last week—is both familiar and (like the song says) not too familiar. Its limited color palate, chunky bitmaps, and chiptune songs feel like a language I know, but didn't grow up speaking. And yet it's an enthralling language that has had me fully obsessed for the last few days.

I'm doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it's actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of. The premise, told in bitmapped stills in the opening menu, is this: A group of game developers discovered a long-forgotten 1980s game console, the LX, in an abandoned storage locker. They work to port the system to a PC, and then emulate 50 of the best games produced for the LX console by UFO Soft from 1982-1989. Those 50 games are packaged together in UFO 50 and, in addition to the basic rules and gameplay information, each one comes with a small backstory of its development and the date it was published.

This is, of course, all fictional. There was no UFO Soft, no LX system. None of the games ever existed, until now.

Barbuta, the first game created by UFO Soft.

Bushido Ball, the incredibly fun samurai tennis game.

And yet each of the games is so lovingly crafted with such an impeccable eye and ear to 1980s games that you pretty quickly forget that you're not playing something vintage but instead something modern. And these aren't tiny games either. They're full-length, fully playable, remarkably difficult, and wholly addicting. And they're varied, from old-school adventure games, sports games, space fights, dungeon crawls, and then a lot that are truly, astoundingly, weird.

I literally can't stop playing Party House.

I've been mostly obsessed with Party House, a simple deckbuilding game where you invite people to a house party, but if you include too many troublemakers the cops shut it down. Yes, this is a game. And yes, it's amazing.

But there's also something larger going on. At least I'm pretty sure there is. There are characters, not in the games but in the minimalist history of the UFO Soft team. There's Thorson Petter, who almost got fired developing Barbuta, the first game in the collection. There's Gerry Smolski, who started at LX Systems as a hardware specialist but designed his first game with Paint Chase, a sort of 8-bit Splatoon played with F1 cars. And there's Benedikt Chun, creator of Golfaria, a game where you explore a distant land as a sentient golf ball (I told you the games were weird). Through these tiny game descriptions you get a sense of the people, their relationships, their family. The company grows, LX Systems becomes UFO Soft. The LX system has at least three generations. And then… it ends. And I can't help but think there's a story to that hiding somewhere. I can't wait to find it.

Paint Chase gives Tron lightcycle vibes.

Fist Hell might be the best name for a fighter ever.

UFO 50 feels boundless in the best possible way. The joy the creators took in making it all is evident in every pixel. It's a love letter to a golden era of videogames. It immerses you in the way that all the best art does: it brings you in and you never want to leave. It might be a game (or 50) but it has the depth of a novel and I can't wait to keep reading.