This is a game that is proud of what it is, which means that this game's main character flaw, despite its 5 hour story campaign, is that it has too many levels. This is supposed to be a fun co-op game where you and your friends are just hanging out with a couple of beers on a Friday night, and they go and throw in some bullshit government facility levels where you're dragging a couch across moving platforms suspended above a vat of pink science acid. If I'm not chucking that couch through someone's bedroom window, what's the point.

This game's story mode is 100% possible with only a single person but you really, really notice that there is only one type of gameplay (moving and hurling furniture of various sizes) when you're all by yourself. There is a wide variety of level gimmicks/hazards but they really do front-end the first half of the game with all the interesting level themes before ejecting you into barren science labs and space stations. It just feels way more fun to smash a living room with vases and a TV than it does to smash Science Room With Laser #2. There's only one mountain resort level! Come ON!

That being said, I had fun despite the game being a bit long. I think this game's art style, where they went with "corny 1980's montage" for the soundtrack as your SpongeBob-brained customizable movers are so goshdern cheerful about all the property damage as their awful boss abuses them, absolutely fits. It's not quote unquote "original" but it fits.

Also thank god for this game for having an Assist/Easy Mode that doesn't instantly mock you for using it. Instead, the game flat out tells you that if you're not having fun, you can lower the time requirements and that's nifty. I appreciate any game that allows certain difficult settings to be toggled.

...I just wish the accessibility toggles came with a toilet/Atari/pet/mailbox checklist. This is definitely one of those "trophy/achievements are doable but heavily annoying" type of games.

A very benign, short little game in the "artistic not-mechanically-tuned-enough-to-be-a-full-Metrovania-but-grazing-the-surface 2D platformer" genre that I finished in about a day of casual gaming. I was reminded of two games playing this, one being Ori and the Blind Forest (with a smaller budget) and the other being Kajenx's flash game William and Sly 2 (with a bigger budget), and it certainly scratches that itch if you're looking for a pretty low-energy 6 hour puzzle romp with no enemies to kill.

The narrative of this game is what you expect; a cute fox (or, rather, a spirit inside a cute fox) has to save the forest and the glowy-eyed big animal guardians from some sort of spooky threat that has a bunch of scary brambles, and they harness the power of the elements in order to make 4 times the color palettes and art assets for each level as they solve platforming puzzles.

What I did not expect is that the sinister undertones of your character's actions to help your mysterious benefactor are intentional, so if you're thinking to yourself "Wow, that glowing spirit just possessed that fox and took over its body, that's kinda messed up!", then I'm happy to report that the game actually accounts for this rather than just leaves this as unspoken fridge horror. The writing isn't amazing but hey, props for this fun little narrative twist.

Unfortunately, where it shines in artistic merit, it falters in the actual gameplay. The biggest problem is the backtracking. This game has an area where you start at the center, travel to one of the four corners (one for each season/guardian), travel back to the center, and rinse and repeat until all four corners are accounted for. This was great the first time. This was acceptable the second time since you unlocked all of your season-changing powers and it's nice to see what new areas could be unlocked with your full arsenal. This was...kind of a slog when, in the final act of the game, the Guardian bear told me I had to do it all again a third time in order to roll credits. Sure, slightly different areas opened up that third time, but I was still running through the same locations for 80% of the time I was doing the final Ritual section with no map or options for fast travel beyond the extremely situational warpstones and magic ziplines.

That being said, it's hard to fault this game for the padding when, even with said padding, it only took me about 6 hours to hit Platinum.

Gorgeous game and at a nice little bite-sized length, but also this game made me do the same Cicada Tree three separate times and there's only so much waiting for floating platform cycles that I can take before I ask the game "what did I do to deserve this".

While I do love this childhood game of mine and I think the mysterious "you figure it out" nature of recruiting Digimon and progressing through this game gives it a unique charm, it also took me 20 goddamn years to get to the final boss. Any kid that was able to beat this game in the 90's was either a gifted being born with divine will and patience or sprung for the strategy guide because good lord some of the game's puzzles and evolution requirements are disgustingly obtuse.

Also I love that one of the things that you unlock is a jukebox that will crash the game if you try to use it. A+ localization there.

As someone who loved Sea of Stars enough to Platinum it, I'm sad that The Messenger didn't win me over in the same way. Instead I was mostly really annoyed that this game's plot connections to Sea of Stars were the exact opposite of a cinematic payoff. Sure, all the shared locations and music were really cute, but all of the villains that stepped through a portal and walked out of the plot of Sea of Stars all just come back as pretty generic demon monsters and that's a little irritating.

It genuinely adds nothing to know that the Demon King was once four reoccurring minibosses and a Dweller glued together by the Fleshmancer for the shits 'n' giggles. The villain who would later become Barma'thazël has his memory wiped so nothing about this character carries over between games beyond his facial hair. Could've just let me defeat all those guys in the RPG I was playing earlier instead of playing Keep Away.

Narrative connection gripes aside, it is what most people say - The Messenger's first half is probably the best Ninja Gaiden clone you'll ever hope to play with a gorgeous sprite art and soundtrack, an absolute delight of a 2D platformer that plays well and gives the player enough of a toolbox to do sick endless jumps through their environment...and then it decides to be a mediocre Metroidvania and just piss away your time with obnoxious backtracking as you comb the map for shiny things while Quarble is eating your time shards and making rude calls to your mother.

The Metroidvania part really is the iron shackle chained to The Messenger's ankle that drags the whole game down. The level designs in this game are not a one-size-fits-all for both pure 2D Ninja Gaiden bliss and explore-y, backtrack-y Metroidvania-ing. Scarce checkpoint placement that's forgivable for a tough action game becomes an absolute slog if I have to explore the same long stretch of map over and over again for a fetch-quest. Howling Grotto and Searing Crags in particular were revisited a good 4-5 times during my Platinum run and I was starting to get really bored of gliding through the same air vents over and over and over.

It's a shame too, because after you choke down the second half's backtracking like a leftover turkey sandwich and get all the magical MacGuffins, you're rewarded with an amazing final level that times the environmental hazards to the music, reminding you of the game that The Messenger could've been from start to finish.

Despite all of that, I'd say it's a decent game. It has extremely high highs but then trips and sprains its ankle for a couple hours because it needed that cool little hook to set it apart from its retro contemporaries. I stuck around long enough to Platinum it too; I just miss the cool game that it was until it decided to become tedious.

According to a friend who works in agriculture, this game is actually pretty accurate in how it portrays sheep - in that they're boring, fragile, and will randomly die because they ate something growing in their enclosure.

I don't want to be too harsh on this game since this is obviously an iOS game made by a small team quickly ported to the PSN store to make a quick buck, but this really isn't that good. As a virtual pet, the sheep don't feel enough like individuals that you get attached to any of them (you can't even name them! That's the first thing you learn in Virtual Pet 101 right there!) nor do you see any baby sheep for very long, and as a farm sim, you don't end up with enough sheep that you feel like a hot shot industrial farmer. The sheep cap out at around 12 individuals, a number too big to get attached to any of these creatures and a number too small to feel like you're commanding this giant herd.

Instead this game feels part idle clicker game? Most of this game involves awkwardly dragging a rain cloud around and making enough grass and puddles so that your sheep don't starve/thirst to death because they wandered a couple feet to the right. As you do so, you wait for your sheep to either poop out some stars or for them to give you quests (which are things like "feed your sheep seven times" or "play on the swing three times"). You wait for the quests which give you experience which fills up your experience bar which unlocks more levels which unlocks more story and it's all excruciatingly dull.

I was up to level 16, one trophy away from 100% trophy completion (because I'll be blunt - the only reason I was playing this is because this game is leaving the PS Plus service in two weeks), and I was just Waiting, because I needed to wait to get to level 17 so I can discover the map to the Sheep Fountain of Youth because this game has an actual story progression for some reason. It didn't need a story but it has one. It'll take six hours of your life to beat the story and you'll be bored every step of the way.

While you're frittering away your time, you harvest four separate materials. One of the materials you harvest is wool. You might think "oh, so shearing the sheep is a mechanic, right? Sounds normal". Yes, it is, but don't be fooled - this is a trap. This game is weirdly punishing towards the very natural process of shearing sheep by making your sheep very fragile while they're shorn, and the most common way for these sheep to die is by freezing to death whilst naked. This means that the "safest" way to shear your sheep is to create a storm cloud and blast them with lightning bolts like you're Thor, God of Thunder.

Another material is heart petals. You have to collect these quickly or else your sheep will eat the flowers they generate from, get horny, but be unable to breed because you already hit max sheep an hour into gameplay. So you'll just have these sheep with hearts buzzing about their heads. They also like eating poisonous mushrooms and dying from it if you focus on one area of the map for far too long.

Alright, alright, I'll find positives. For an iOS game ported to the PS4, it runs very smoothly and the interface works fine. I also do like the art style of this game and how the sheep are very obviously voiced by humans making sheep noises in a recording studio at least.

And I guess, at the end of the day, they made raising sheep as exciting as it would be. I'm sure a small child that's really into sheep is having the best time ever with this game.

I give it a "bah" out of ten.

While this collection is definitely the best (or, at the very least, the most easily accessible) way to play these games, keep some things in mind before you buy:

1. They're the Dragon's Lair games, and I hope you know what you're getting into before you make this purchase because this collection probably won't change anyone's mind on the Dragon's Lair style of trial-and-error gameplay.
2. All three of these games take about an hour to beat. Yes, this means you'll be paying 20 dollars for a three hour game. Luckily, this collection goes on sale pretty frequently, unless you're buying the Wii version for over 50 USD, but why the hell would you do that.
3. The presentation of the menus can be best described as "early 2000's DVD" and it comes off as really unpolished. There's choppy music samples that loop, ugly button layouts, the full nine yards. I assume the Wii release of the game looked like this and they didn't really edit it much when porting to modern consoles.
4. There's not much in the way of bonus features. There's an interview and one deleted scene for Time Warp. Not a deal-breaker, but a major disappointment.
5. There's no way to pause or go frame-by-frame on the gorgeous 2D animation. Again, not a deal-breaker, but a disappointment.

But, despite that, if you are looking to play the Dragon's Lair games, this isn't a bad way to do it. The collection could've been better but hey, I'm glad these games are readily available. The 2D animation is charming and these games contain some of Don Bluth's best work. You just have to navigate some ugly menus before you play.