198X

In an introductory sequence entitled Beating Heart that plays like a side-scrolling beat 'em up, the teenage protagonist fights their way from the subway station and through the streets of the unnamed city in which they live until they reach a hospital where they are attacked by a hooded figure with glowing red eyes.

Set in the 1980s, the game follows the Kid, the teenager from the introduction, who feels stuck in their childhood home in "sleepy suburbia" as they wait for their life to "move forward". One night, as the Kid wanders the streets of their unnamed city looking for anything to "make my heart skip a beat again", they stumble across an abandoned factory that was built "long before" the protagonist was born and now houses an arcade. Wondering if they found a place where they can fit in, they start playing a horizontally scrolling space shooter entitled Out of the Void. Feeling disconnected at school, the Kid's mind frequently returns to the arcade where they were "on an asteroid somewhere fighting Space Invaders."

A KickStarter page for 198X was launched on May 3, 2018, With the developer Hi-Bit Studios seeking SEK 500,000 for the project. The goal was reached a little under a month later on June 2 with 1,920 backers pledging SEK 676,558.

The PlayStation 4, PC, and Nintendo Switch versions of 198X all received "mixed or average" reviews from critics, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received fair approval, being recommended by 53% of critics. Writing for Nintendo Life, Damien McFerren gave the game 8/10 stars, stating that while 198X had an "exceptional" soundtrack and cited Out of the Void as "perhaps the highlight of the entire game", he found the game to be too short, with McFerren able to breeze through the entirety of 198X in "around an hour". He also bemoaned the lack of replayability in the mini-games, which he found little point in returning to "outside of boosting your high score".

In his review for GameSpot, James O'Connor gave 198X 5/10 stars, calling the game "mediocre" and stating that while the soundtrack "does a great job of evoking the arcade classics it is paying homage to" and calling Shadowplay "great" he ultimately concluded that 198X was a "great idea with middling execution" and that there's "not enough here for the game to feel like a proper ode to '80s arcades" and that "the Kid's plight, and his longing to escape his current life" don't "totally connect". He finished the review by saying, "198X feels more like a proof of concept than a final product." Eurogamer's Martin Robinson stated that he was "cynical" going into 198X due to seeing many other games like it before but praised its style and the "pitch perfect pastiches" of classic arcade games, which he called "the most assured part of the whole package".