The UFO 50 Diaries: Ninpek
I'm terrible at this game
One of the things that crops up in a lot of folk’s initial impressions about UFO 50 is that it’s layout and design encourages you to have a go at a bit of everything. Initial impressions are a huge indicator, for many, about whether you will get on with a game or not, but that impatience is also an obstacle to truly digging in and getting to the meat of these experiences.
Everyone’s first impression of Barbuta, including my own, was of bewilderment and arcane annoyance, but the more I stuck with that game the more I found myself falling in love. Bug Hunter, likewise, was an experience that matured and digested beautifully over time, great initially but much better once I sank a few hours into it.
Ninpek is going to be a much harder sell for me, I think.
This interesting take on the auto-scrolling platformer seems custom built to piss off anyone with poor hand-eye coordination. There are too many hazards on screen all at once, hitboxes seem riotously unforgiving, three lives is way too few chances given how harsh the consequences of failure are.
But like the previous games in this collection I’ve played (and bare in mind like in the introduction paragraph I’ve dabbled in everything already so I know this will be true for literally every one of these 50 games), there’s a clear understanding from the get go that things aren’t so straightforward.
What Ninpek is doing is subversive in a way that’s honestly quite hard to parse at first, because it all seems so straightforward. You run, and jump, and throw shurikens at a selection of foes, dodging projectiles and navigating a conveyor belt of platforms in pursuit of a vicious sandwich thief.
But Ninpek is also a game that begs a lot of questions almost immediately:
What’s up with you turning into a ghost when you get hit?
What do the golden shurikens that some enemies drop do and how do they differ to the green eggs?
Why go to all this trouble over a sandwich?
In my admittedly brief engagements with the game (i’m really struggling with this one, I have to admit) I can see that there are two tracks laid out before players: Survival, and score chasing. To learn the game at first is to stake out an understanding of how you move and how that relates to the hazards you need to avoid.
Your player character is a zippy little fellow indeed, and there’s a process through which you could get quite far by avoiding everything the game is throwing at you, but that won’t net you the high score you so clearly covet. That’s where the second track comes in. Knowing what to attack, and what to avoid, when to take the risk to collect one of those manky eggs and when to leave well alone.
An apt suggestion for the pursuit of mastery might denote that these two tracks are, in fact, one in the same, that survival and score chasing are two sides of the same coin and to that I would argue that you’ve probably unearthed a third track that I will likely never know.
Part of my challenge with this entry compared to the previous two is that I’m repeating the same stretch of gameplay ad nauseum. Where Barbuta had pathways to follow, even if some led to seeming dead ends, and Bug Hunter had it’s procedurally allocated events to breathe life into each restart after a failed attempt, Ninpek just has the game.
In order to see the game, you have to survive the game, and this is the thing I’m struggling the most with currently. Catching the briefest of glimpses of something new on the edge of the screen on occasion but inevitably biffing it before I can figure out what that exciting new thing even is.
The more I play, the less confident I feel about the progress I seem to be making in it. It’s too busy. My hand-eye coordination is too poor. Maybe my controller broke at the worst possible time and it’s just a much smoother experience when you aren’t wrestling with the keyboard controls?
I don’t know about this one. I admire its convictions but I’m not having a good time playing it. I guess that’s what folk are really talking about, and I guess that’s the magic of UFO 50.
There’s always the next game