Part Time UFO, a lovely physics game developed by HAL Egg and published by HAL Laboratory, was surprise-ported onto Nintendo Switch after beginning its life as a mobile game in 2023. The sport includes a crash-landed UFO who puts their giant claw to make use of helping the folks out and about with their lifting and moving problems, all for many nice, equitable pay.
I can’t imagine how farmville played as a mobile title as the joystick controls are perfectly reminiscent of a claw game at the boardwalk or arcade. Your UFO friend drops its claw down, wide-open and able to grab something. Whenever you latch on, whether to a box of fruit, a piece of a construction project, or perhaps a very patient cheerleader, your claw starts swinging around and your grip becomes precarious. The controls are extremely sensitive, but always fair as you work to carefully keep and balance each object. You may also bump objects, attempt to flip them, and use the momentum of the swinging claw to get extra advanced in your manipulation.
The objectives in every level vary from stacking items at any height, building objects with slightly lopsided elements, collecting things as fast as possible, or manipulating heavy objects in a proper series to help make the load bearable. They’re all cutely themed too, whereby one level you may be helping a farmer, the next, a museum curator, and subsequently, an angler.
Each level has three bonus objectives, one usually tied to completion inside a specific amount of your time and the other two based on visual puzzles. Whenever you pause the sport, images of what the sport requires of you can have, but they are not necessarily completely clear. If you can decipher the things they mean though, you earn medals. These medals have to unlock the following three levels, as well as may bring about in-game achievements. Achieving all three inside a given level unlocks another, harder form of the amount.
They also enable you to get more cash. For every item you guide through the game, as well as each bonus objective you complete, you earn money. Money can be redeemed at a store operated with a somewhat racist caricature of the genie-like alien. You purchase absolutely adorable outfits for your UFO at the store, each of which has a different little emote-action your UFO does in-level should you press L.
That’s virtually the entire game. The levels are fun and increasingly difficult as you go on. The incentives between new costumes and in-game achievements count pushing you to ultimately achieve all the medals. There's also a “how high are you able to stack these random objects” mode that is extra challenging, but offers only a local leaderboard and more in-game achievements in exchange.
The music is great and catchy. It’s a simple theme that repeats again and again, but it has slight thematic variations in each level. Part Time UFO also has a local multiplayer mode around the Nintendo Switch. It is basically the exact same because the game in single-player, simply with a friend. The problem isn’t scaled or anything, you just have two UFOs working together now.
The aspect of Part Time UFO that I've found most interesting though personally, like a card-carrying, multiple 1099 wielding member of the gig economy, is just how starkly farmville represents its various realities. When you first being the game, you cold open in to the first level without even seeing a menu. Your UFO buddy is just by accident on the scene of a farmer looking for help. Thinking of doing what's right and enjoying using your claw to maneuver things around, you help out. However, the farmer offers to pay you. He literally makes a comment about how exactly bizarre it is you’ve never been justly paid for your labor before. Then he provides you with a lecture about the value of work and provides you having a magazine full of job listings to visit off making more money in the freelance world.
So, similarly, I deeply appreciate this farmer is prioritizing justice and equity within the labor he advantages of. As a basic moral value, his immediate propensity to pay you for the work, unprompted, may be the way everybody should treat labor. But however, his schpiel concerning the worth of hard work and also the need for every teenager to visit out and produce their keep is concerning. Neither humans nor UFOs ought to be judged based on how much one man thinks they bring about the workforce.
He’s also adding to the hustle-fication of the UFO’s pastime. As so many people are learning these days, it’s not necessarily healthy to turn your passions into work. It will take the joy and relaxation out of it. Yet, the cute little living space that your UFO buddy hangs out in on the main menu suggests that clearly, the gig work they perform is for additional discretionary income, not basic survival. You use the money you earn to buy cute clothes for fun, to not pay your rent. So this quandary is difficult to evaluate.
In a time where a lot of folks are embracing gig economy exercise of sheer necessity because it is the only real type of work that's available, so when companies like Uber and Lyft are fighting so hard to make gig labor less protected and fewer valued, I’m a bit uncomfortable with a game that is so explicitly romanticizing gig labor. While you will find indeed romantic elements, as well as for many, it is a viable income source or livelihood, it's not always a just or healthy system. At least Part Time UFO emphasizes just compensation for labor performed. I just hope our buddy here gets a healthy body insurance, sets their very own hours, and isn’t slammed on their own tax statements.
Psuedo-serious discussion of labor justice aside, Part Time UFO is a lovely and totally fun little game well worth the handful of bucks. The numerous challenging levels, in-game incentives, super-cute aesthetic, and incredibly captivating gameplay get this to game well worth the leap from mobile to console.
Part Time UFO is available now on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.
