The UFO 50 Diaries: Fist Hell
I swear to god there *has* to be more room in hell
The ongoing history of the side scrolling brawler is one that I’m admittedly very in the dark on. I have never really played Streets of Rage. I’m only broadly familiar with its more contemporary peers, like Scott Pilgrim and the TMNT games.
I suspect a lot of this boils down to the fact that I came to games a bit later in life compared to other folk of a similar age. I bypassed the first few generations of home consoles, wrapped in a cosy cocoon of Beano annuals and Power Rangers toys. I cut my teeth on the first forays into that cursed third dimension with games like Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time.
Because of this absence of context, my experience with UFO 50 has been noticeably muted along one of its axes. I like the games in this collection a lot. I even love some of them. The design principles of the past aren’t these ancient artefacts that need to be kept behind glass.
As Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr once said, all eras of gaming are happening at the same time, and yet when I play a game like Fist Hell, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something vital.
To clarify, this is an incredibly well designed game. A sharp combat system met amicably by a range of distinctive enemy types that force you to remove yourself from caveman-like button mashing to get through.
This is a game about crowd control more than anything else, matching the Living Dead thematics perfectly in that regard. Allow too many ghouls to creep up on you and you’ll be met with a swift end. Let another set of too many ghouls slip out off screen, and you might find yourself on fire, or adorned with an axe in the bonce.
As health restoring items are not bountiful and checkpoints are few and far between (as I can make out there are likely four for the entire game), getting what little health you have to begin with whittled down is an exercise akin to slamming your fingers in a car door. At times the brutal difficulty of the game does everything in its power to highlight every specific piece of game design that has led to me yelling ‘fuck off!’ at my computer screen every time I play.
Fist Hell is annoying to play, for me, because I’m really not used to this kind of game. I struggle to make peace with the fact that I have no depth perception here, regularly finding myself swatting at the air above a zombie’s head as I wind up a punch or kick. I find myself irked by how bitty that double-tap-to-sprint feature that is in no way new at all and in fact a feature of all brawlers since the dawn of time is.
I really don’t like how punishing the whole experience ends up being considering how inflexible and specific its control scheme is. I really think there should be at least double the number of checkpoints and triple the health pickups. I also think the game could *really* benefit with at least some degree of randomisation of enemy encounters, because what really dogs me the most about my experience of this is that it’s the same group of arseholes ruining my day almost every time, and it gets boring after a while.
I know I’m telling a bunch of veteren game developers how to do their job which is prime dickhead behaviour, but with these adjustments in place, I think that what is there, which is, understandably, really bloody good, would truly shine.
Its clear that Mossmouth have looked at what makes this genre tick, and drilled down into something more precise and thoughtful. ‘Your moveset will save you’ is what the game explicitly tells you, and what they get out of those two buttons and a D-pad is remarkably sophisticated, intricate enough that you could build a far more procedural set of systems around it.
I suspect if I had the inclination to properly sit down, make peace with my frustrations and actually learn the specificities of the game, I would find a greater level of joy in mastery. For my sins, however, the inflexibility of the game’s challenge coupled with the fact that it is the same set of encounters each time make for an experience that just pissed me off too much to want to continue playing.