Love-de-Lic was a quirky developer whose games left a lasting impression on Japanese game design with their experimental and empathy-driven philosophy. They rejected conventional combat and progression systems in favour of non-violent interactions, quirky everyday characters, day-night cycles, and themes of love and connection. This philosophy was seen as early as their first game, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, which prioritised healing the world and building relationships over levelling up, creating intimate, quirky experiences that felt personal and subversive.
After only three games, Love-de-Lic was dissolved, and the staff splintered off into other game companies. Their philosophy made its way into games like Chibi-Robo, Chulip, Rule of Rose, Stray Children, and even the Tingle series, carrying forward Love-de-Lic’s whimsical world-building and offbeat puzzles. Although it was never localised outside of Japan, that didn’t stop Hamster from bringing it to the West through their Console Archives line of releases. Can non-Japanese speakers get any fun out of this cosmic adventure of intimate proportions? Read on in this UFO -A day in the life- review to find out!
Like every Japanese-only release under Hamster’s Archive label, UFO -A day in the life- is mostly in Japanese apart from the manual and system settings. However, it’s surprisingly easy to understand and is accessible even for players who don’t know a lick of Japanese. After a space cruise crashes into an ordinary apartment building on Earth, a small alien is dispatched from the mothership. Fifty of its fellow aliens are stranded inside, scattered through various rooms and outdoor spaces. Due to Earth’s electromagnetic waves and other environmental techno babble reasons, these stray aliens have become completely invisible.
The gameplay revolves around finding and rescuing the invisible aliens. Equipped with a scanner, the protagonist visits different rooms of the apartment complex at various times of day and must carefully observe the human residents, animals, and everyday routines for clues. Clues could be anything from a startled cat to odd behaviour or strange environmental changes that hint at the presence of an invisible alien. Mechanically, it’s like taking photographs, aiming for specific batch scenes. The thing is, missing aliens stay invisible even if a shot is taken. There’s no way of knowing if a shot is successful until after taking the shots to the Mother alien and letting her develop them.
If a photo clearly shows an E.T., Mother sends the rescue team to retrieve the stranded passengers and unlock new areas or times of day. Along the way, the game subtly depicts slices of the human residents’ daily lives and small dramas unfolding in the apartments, creating a quirky, observational backdrop to the alien-rescue mission. The story is light and vignette driven, focusing more on the unusual situation and the process of discovery than on elaborate plot twists or character arcs. It’s mostly driven entirely by the visuals and hardly relies on text at all, making UFO a pretty easy-to-understand game. Hamster’s in-game manual makes things very clear, even if it’s painfully obvious that it was translated by Google.
It would have been nice to be able to freely explore the apartment instead of depending on the mothership to transport to different areas. The strict time limit in every room is also immersion breaking but ultimately necessary since scenes and vignettes have to be reset, possibly due to memory limitations. As is, the protagonist alien can only take ten shots before he’s automatically beamed up to present his findings anyway, which is a fair enough reason to be shunted back to the ship.
While UFO is a novel take on an adventure game, its gameplay is basic and dull. What makes UFO so interesting is Love-de-Lic’s signature mixed-media visual style. The graphics are a mix of prerendered sprites, hand-drawn characters, 3D models, and even claymation. The atmosphere is fantastic, perfectly capturing the essence of everyday life with a quirky and unique art style that will make fans of Moon: Remix RPG feel right at home. Unlike other games by the same developers from Love-de-Lic’s lineage, UFO is short. Even without knowing Japanese, expect to negotiate the entire rescue mission in about five to six hours while playing leisurely.
For a game about aliens, there’s a profound sense of humanity here. The residents’ lives play out in fragments across different times of day: a drinking, pachinko-loving father who struggles to connect with his son while the mother worries over the household; a bedridden yakuza boss and his bodyguards caught up in a violent chase by police; a reclusive computer geek glued to his screens and dabbling in online crime; a sensitive artist and his girlfriend navigating a fragile romance; a salaryman leading an utterly average life; plus various pets and side characters reacting to strange, unseen disturbances. They live, argue, work, rest, and stage small dramas. Their actions, along with odd moments like a sudden pratfall, a startled animal, or a strange reaction, are the only hints of the invisible aliens among them.
Love the style on this