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UFO 50 - Caramel Caramel - True End No-Death Clear - 186,715 Pts

UFO 50

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UFO 50 is a completely deranged new retro-inspired indie game where you get 50 games for the price of one.
Developed and published by Mossmouth, of Spelunky fame, the idea is kinda that it's like Action 52 but with actually good games. Probably one of the most ambitious indie games I've seen.
Of course this also contains a few shmups so I had to play them.

The other main shmup here is Caramel Caramel, the horizontal shmup in this.
Probably the best shmup in the package, it's a cute little game with some novel mechanics, design and a fairly complex scoring system with tons of secrets.
More of a strategic obstacle' em' up where you avoid enemies and terrain rather than bullets.

Game revolves around a camera mechanic but with a different spin than usual.
Instead of using it to cancel bullets like something you'd see in Shoot the Bullet, you instead use it to weaken enemies, chain them for score and uncover secrets in the background. 
There is also a charge attack if you hold shot for a bit. This attack bounces, pierces and is quite strong.

The cherry achievement requires you to face the True Last Boss that leads to the True End.
To trigger it you need to take a picture of a hidden letter in each planet stage.

You can take one hit before you die and each planet stage has an item that repairs this hit.
There's lots of points in not getting hit though, as the repair item is worth a 1000 points if you didn't get hit and the No-Hit bonus at the end of stages is also worth 4000 points.
This does not apply to the Orb Shower stages as they don't have stage-end bonuses.

Pictures stun enemies, drop them from ceilings, put them in a weakened state, give a x2 multiplier when killed and chain react on other enemies. 
Scoring often consists of taking trick shots where you want to get as many things in the frame as possible. 
However you can only take a picture when the meter in the top-left is full. This increases slowly over time, but there are also crystals that recharge it for 50%.
The kicker here is that crystals get dropped for every 6th enemy killed, and this is where the true score routing challenge begins. There is nothing in the HUD that displays this either, you just have to keep track of this yourself. 
Crystals normally auto-collect, but you can keep them around by holding the shot button, which is another layer of complexity.

Besides the letters, in the background there are tons of other objects to take pictures of to spawn bonus score orbs. Some spawn 3 orbs and some 6. 
Each orb start at 10 points and increases in value for each 6 destroyed, up to 200 points.
All of this combined makes scoring quite challenging. You're juggling many things at once and routing it all is quite complex.

Dying resets the orb value back to 10, but it also does something else.
You see, dying also resets YOUR ENTIRE SCORE.
I've never seen a game before that did this lmao, not even arcade games were this cruel. 
I guess it's one way to prevent people from checkpoint milking in a checkpoint shmup but it's also like throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

Speaking of checkpoints, dying in this game also resets THE ENTIRE STAGE.
No continues or practice modes either, so from a modern sensibility standpoint it just makes the games kinda wildly obnoxious to practice.

That's kinda a thing with UFO 50 as a whole though, a lot of these games are shockingly hard, unforgiving and obtuse for a modern release.
I feel like they wanted to capture that old 'Nintendo Hard' feeling with NES games but then overshot a lot of the time. Like checkpoint shmups didn't reset the entire stage. The only one I can think of that did was Super R-Type and it was widely criticized for that. NES games also used to come with manuals and you weren't supposed to just trial-and-error everything out yourself.

The thing I mostly don't like about Caramel Caramel is the movement speed, it's unnecessary slow and restrictive.
Hitboxes are also quite huge.

Buy the game on Steam here:
https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1147860/UFO_50/

00:00 - Prologue
01:48 - Snack Planet
04:57 - Orb Shower A
06:12 - Ghost Planet
09:10 - Orb Shower B
10:21 - Dino Planet
13:34 - True Last Boss
14:22 - Ending & Credits

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