It starts with a little lesson in how many pop culture nods you can fit in five minutes: the 1978 video game Space Invaders, the Back to the Future and Star Wars posters, Converse Chucks, Karate-style headbands Kid”, bonanza bikes and skinny jeans.

This is how the game "Unusual Findings" begins, and anyone who doesn't think of the series "Stranger Things" or films like "The Goonies" or "Gremlins" has overslept the last few years or the whole eighties.

The small but amazingly successful game from Argentina tells a coming-of-age story.

Teenager Vinny is grounded - so the first task is to break out of the teenager's room.

And then it goes step by step in a story about adults who don't like to listen to the children and aliens who want to destroy everything on earth.

Vinny meets his friends Tony and Nick who want to hack cable TV and watch topless shows.

Instead, they receive a message from extraterrestrials, look for the UFO in the forest, witness a murder and find themselves in the middle of the mysterious story.

Pixel games come back

Unusual Findings is a point and click adventure.

The genre is so named because you point the mouse at an object in the picture and then click to do something with it – mostly simple things like “open window” or “use key”.

Such adventures were the dominant genre of the late eighties, and this new game now looks as pixelated as the games of that time.

But the old adventures from the nineties are currently experiencing a special moment.

"Manic Mansion" from 1987 is to be continued, "Return to Monkey Island" has already been released recently, the long-awaited sequel to the highly successful first two "Monkey Island" games from 1990 and 1991. The pirate fairy tale made the technical limitations of the first PCs with humor and a great narration.

The new part turned out to be a good game, has a lot of the old humor - but no retro look at all.

It looks more like a somewhat expressive comic, like something new.

For “Unusual Findings”, the Argentinian studio Epic Llama wanted to transfer the recipe for success from the “Stranger Things” series to the games world: everything should look as if the game were from around 1988. There is a comic shop, a gangster’s trailer, an abandoned one Haunted house and always the same facades of bourgeois families.

The story works as if life were a three question mark novel.

With the customer card from the shopping center you can take part in the swap club of the comic shop.

Only there is the important book about scout knots.

Once you have it, you can finally untie the hammock at the nearby farm, which will later help to build a trap for aliens.

And so forth.

Everything is combinatorics.

And after all, life is easy.

Of course, a pixelated video game always has an air of harmlessness about it.

It's reminiscent of the time when gaming was just gaming.

It may have ended when the 2001 terrorists were training with Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

And that you can practice strategies for military operations with “Call of Duty” today is obvious.

There are already "Ukraine War Mods" for several current shooters with soldiers in the right uniforms and weapons, with locations where fighting is actually taking place.

"Unusual Findings" is pleasantly innocent.

A game as a living book

It's about friendship, mad scientists and strange machines, youthful punks and the somewhat eerie charm of the American suburbs.

And everything is accompanied by synthesizer music ("You spin me round").

"Unusual Findings" appears for all common devices, but works particularly well on the Nintendo Switch.

This console is slightly larger than a cell phone, with detachable controllers left and right - gaming for the sofa or the coffee shop - so this game can be considered a living book.

It is also quite a complex book.

So it behaves differently every time, depending on the decisions you make.

It has three different resolutions;

whether there is a happy ending or not depends on the players.

The year 2022 was not a big year for games.

With its 2D graphics from the last century, "Unusual Findings" captivates more than many of the big games like "Elden Ring" or "God of War Ragnarök".

One often hears that the game companies are pushing small developers to the edge of the market and that there can hardly be any great independent games anymore.

Here is the proof to the contrary.

"The eighties were the best decade," says the adult Vinny at the end after a time jump.

"Life was simple, it was a time of discovery, the world somehow smelled new." That's certainly nonsense.

But you think it's just that little bit easier in a pixelated game with 8-bit music.