The Messenger is an interesting take on NES-era game design with cool art and music, but its central “twist” leaves a lot to be desired. What are, at their core, good levels and mechanics are held back by terrible pacing and frustrating design decisions.
6 / 10
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This is a game I wish I could like more than I do. And that’s kinda sad, because when I first started playing it, I thought this could very well enter my top games of this year. When I think about it, it has all the hallmarks of a great game. Its mechanics are certainly very polished, to the point where it’s hard to believe that this was really made by a small Indie studio. The music is very memorable, and the art style(s) look fantastic.
And yet, somehow I found myself increasingly annoyed with this game, the longer I played it. Something just doesn’t feel quite right with it all, and despite some great ideas here, The Messenger’s individual elements somehow add up to less than the sum of its part. The thing is, I even heard from a friend how they found this game very disappointing, which I found strange because it seemed pretty cool to me. But I realised what he meant at the half-way point at the latest.
It definitely starts out very strong. At first, it presents itself as a fairly simple, 8-bit NES-Ninja Gaiden-style, old-school action-platformer. You start the game as a young ninja, who receives a magic scroll that he has to carry up a mountain after his village has been destroyed by demons - simple enough. Some small bits of exposition out of the way, and we’re thrown right into the first level.
Let’s talk about the gameplay then; for what it does in the early levels, it’s more than enough. Combat is snappy and quick. You only have 2 weapons; a sword, and some shuriken you can unlock super early (you could also ignore them for the whole game though). Enemies tend to die in a single hit, with some exceptions that take 2-3 hits to kill. The trade off for this: they respawn literally as soon as the screen rolls past them. Again, absolutely fine for an old-school, linear NES-style platformer that doesn’t really expect you to do much backtracking. There is no dash move, so you have to dodge enemy attacks purely with proper positioning and jumping. This is all very fun. Nothing special, or crazy or hugely innovative, but a nice throwback to some nostalgic 8-bit platformers.
The next few levels are fine as well, and they introduce some of the game’s permanent power ups. The first level also gave you the wall climb ability, but the next levels make more use of progression upgrades. This is, of course, some foreshadowing into the game’s major “twist”. At this point in my playthrough it’s been quite fun, and I blasted through almost half of the early game within 2 hours. I did notice a significant increase in difficulty quite early on, but so far nothing too egregious.
I can’t really say when exactly my experience with this game went from mostly enjoyable to downright laborious, but I think it must’ve been around the Searing Cracks or Glacial Peak levels when I couldn’t stop noticing that “this is a bit frustrating.” It was a pretty gradual progression to that point. I can’t even really say what exactly it was, maybe it’s a mix of a lot of things. The fact that enemy variety is a bit lacking - there are maybe 20 unique enemies throughout the ENTIRE game, and at this point it’s maybe half of that - certainly doesn’t help with the fact that a single mistake can kill you and send you back to the checkpoint. I think my biggest problem are what feel like extremely cheap, trolly ways to kill the player, like: (including but not limited to) instant-kill traps, platforming sections that expect WAY more of you than it should (given your extremely limited air mobility), projectiles or enemies that come out of nowhere when you’re mid air, etc. To make it short: a lot of the game’s “challenges” feel like you don’t have any real way of anticipating whatever comes next. It feels very “trial and error”.
If the game had kept this style of gameplay up until the end, I’d probably still really like it. A great old school platformer with some (appropriately) frustrating sections. A love letter to old school games. But sadly, this isn’t where it ends.
No, this game has a “twist”. It’s not exactly a secret since it was heavily featured in the marketing, but around 30-40% through this game, it suddenly changes art styles from 8-bit to 16-bit (or, NES to SNES), which is diegetically contextualised as “travelling through time”, as well as shift from a level-to-level type progression system into full-blown Metroidvania.
Both of that sounds extremely cool, and like an absolute no-brainer. But sadly, I have almost equally as many issues with both, and I happen to think that the game was pretty good UP UNTIL this point. See, what I did like about The Messenger’s early game is how fun it is to rush through these levels at (relatively) breakneck speed. But the MV approach here slows that pacing down to a crawl. Now you suddenly have to go back to every single level, backtrack through almost all of them - through areas you’ve already been to - just to get to some short spots within those areas where you can now change the time period manually. Again, this sounds really cool in principle, but ultimately it changes very little of actual substance here. The most it’ll do with these time-changing puzzle rooms is to very slightly alter their layouts, and make some paths impassable (or the reverse) in either mode. Very occasionally it’ll even his feels like an insane waste of potential. No new enemies, no extra abilities, no time-exclusive zones, nothing. For what feels like 90% of the game, you’re going to look at the same enemies, areas and bosses, regardless of NES or SNES era. This was by far the biggest disappointment for me with this whole game. Here we have this twist that’s been built up for literally half of the game, AND was used as the main selling point, and it doesn’t do anything interesting with it.
What’s worse is how the switch to MV completely destroys this game’s previously very good pacing. Where the game would throw you from one area to the next and keep this gravy train going, the second half pulls the brakes HARD. Running from one area to the next is fine if you do it ONCE. If you have to do it over and over again, it gets real tedious real fast.
It’s really unfortunate just how inconsistent this whole experience is. Some levels are fun, others are tedious. Some are clever, others are just annoying. Levels feel like there’s no rhyme or reason to their structure, it’s just random platform challenge after platform challenge. What’s worse is that this game seemingly paid no attention to the fact that IF you’re going to make a Metroidvania without readily available fast travel you need to account for it by making the world efficiently traversable on foot. Getting anywhere takes bloody ages, and forces you through areas you’ve already cleared 20 times by this point. Other MVs understand this perfectly, deliberately designing their world specifically around it. The Messenger feels like somebody created a bunch of platforming levels and tried to retroactively and haphazardly create some “connection parts” between them. This would all be fine if the truly excessive amounts of backtracking in this game felt like there was ANY point to it. But it truly feels like more than half it could’ve been cut down if they just allowed you to fast-travel between checkpoints rather than letting you WALK through all of it again and again.
Something equally and annoying and tedious would be this game’s writing for me. Now, this truly is a matter of taste, and humour differs widely between people, but GODDAMN am I fucking sick and tired of “meta-humour”. I can’t stand it at this point. “BRO did you realise you’re actually playing a VIDEO GAME!?!?” Yes. Yes, I did. It’s one thing if the humour is actually clever and makes a point, like The Stanley Parable, or Undertale or even something like Hotline Miami. This just feels super uninspired and tired. I can honestly say I did not really enjoy the humour here, which is wild considering how much praise it got.
I wanna quickly talk about the boss fights, and highlight another design decision I really do not understand; the amount of waiting you have to do in ALL boss fights. All of them demand that you simply stand or walk around and avoid damage, without anything you can do to somehow cut down the time, or play more efficiently. To me, this is one of the golden rules of any combat system; NEVER rely on waiting as one the core mechanics of any fight. It’s boring at best, and downright infuriating if the boss is somehow difficult. Luckily I can say that the vast majority of bosses are very easy, and only took me about 5 tries at the most. The final boss in particular feels like an absolute joke considering what you fought before. The sad thing is that the combat system does feel nice and it could totally work, but it really IS the designs of the bosses themselves that are the issue here.
At least the game is quite short. I think I was done with all of it after 15-ish hours, I even went out of my way to gather as many collectibles I could be bothered with. I wanna say it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, but that wouldn’t be quite true, by the end I was kinda hoping for it to be over soon.
In conclusion, there will be certainly a lot of people that will really like this game. I’ll say that I noticed that there was a tendency for people that usually don’t really play MVs to like it, while the opposite seems to be true for people who are big fans of the MV genre. There is certainly a lot of love and passion in this game, it’s just sad that it all kind of ended up as a middling experience for me.
6 / 10
6 / 10
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This is a game I wish I could like more than I do. And that’s kinda sad, because when I first started playing it, I thought this could very well enter my top games of this year. When I think about it, it has all the hallmarks of a great game. Its mechanics are certainly very polished, to the point where it’s hard to believe that this was really made by a small Indie studio. The music is very memorable, and the art style(s) look fantastic.
And yet, somehow I found myself increasingly annoyed with this game, the longer I played it. Something just doesn’t feel quite right with it all, and despite some great ideas here, The Messenger’s individual elements somehow add up to less than the sum of its part. The thing is, I even heard from a friend how they found this game very disappointing, which I found strange because it seemed pretty cool to me. But I realised what he meant at the half-way point at the latest.
It definitely starts out very strong. At first, it presents itself as a fairly simple, 8-bit NES-Ninja Gaiden-style, old-school action-platformer. You start the game as a young ninja, who receives a magic scroll that he has to carry up a mountain after his village has been destroyed by demons - simple enough. Some small bits of exposition out of the way, and we’re thrown right into the first level.
Let’s talk about the gameplay then; for what it does in the early levels, it’s more than enough. Combat is snappy and quick. You only have 2 weapons; a sword, and some shuriken you can unlock super early (you could also ignore them for the whole game though). Enemies tend to die in a single hit, with some exceptions that take 2-3 hits to kill. The trade off for this: they respawn literally as soon as the screen rolls past them. Again, absolutely fine for an old-school, linear NES-style platformer that doesn’t really expect you to do much backtracking. There is no dash move, so you have to dodge enemy attacks purely with proper positioning and jumping. This is all very fun. Nothing special, or crazy or hugely innovative, but a nice throwback to some nostalgic 8-bit platformers.
The next few levels are fine as well, and they introduce some of the game’s permanent power ups. The first level also gave you the wall climb ability, but the next levels make more use of progression upgrades. This is, of course, some foreshadowing into the game’s major “twist”. At this point in my playthrough it’s been quite fun, and I blasted through almost half of the early game within 2 hours. I did notice a significant increase in difficulty quite early on, but so far nothing too egregious.
I can’t really say when exactly my experience with this game went from mostly enjoyable to downright laborious, but I think it must’ve been around the Searing Cracks or Glacial Peak levels when I couldn’t stop noticing that “this is a bit frustrating.” It was a pretty gradual progression to that point. I can’t even really say what exactly it was, maybe it’s a mix of a lot of things. The fact that enemy variety is a bit lacking - there are maybe 20 unique enemies throughout the ENTIRE game, and at this point it’s maybe half of that - certainly doesn’t help with the fact that a single mistake can kill you and send you back to the checkpoint. I think my biggest problem are what feel like extremely cheap, trolly ways to kill the player, like: (including but not limited to) instant-kill traps, platforming sections that expect WAY more of you than it should (given your extremely limited air mobility), projectiles or enemies that come out of nowhere when you’re mid air, etc. To make it short: a lot of the game’s “challenges” feel like you don’t have any real way of anticipating whatever comes next. It feels very “trial and error”.
If the game had kept this style of gameplay up until the end, I’d probably still really like it. A great old school platformer with some (appropriately) frustrating sections. A love letter to old school games. But sadly, this isn’t where it ends.
No, this game has a “twist”. It’s not exactly a secret since it was heavily featured in the marketing, but around 30-40% through this game, it suddenly changes art styles from 8-bit to 16-bit (or, NES to SNES), which is diegetically contextualised as “travelling through time”, as well as shift from a level-to-level type progression system into full-blown Metroidvania.
Both of that sounds extremely cool, and like an absolute no-brainer. But sadly, I have almost equally as many issues with both, and I happen to think that the game was pretty good UP UNTIL this point. See, what I did like about The Messenger’s early game is how fun it is to rush through these levels at (relatively) breakneck speed. But the MV approach here slows that pacing down to a crawl. Now you suddenly have to go back to every single level, backtrack through almost all of them - through areas you’ve already been to - just to get to some short spots within those areas where you can now change the time period manually. Again, this sounds really cool in principle, but ultimately it changes very little of actual substance here. The most it’ll do with these time-changing puzzle rooms is to very slightly alter their layouts, and make some paths impassable (or the reverse) in either mode. Very occasionally it’ll even his feels like an insane waste of potential. No new enemies, no extra abilities, no time-exclusive zones, nothing. For what feels like 90% of the game, you’re going to look at the same enemies, areas and bosses, regardless of NES or SNES era. This was by far the biggest disappointment for me with this whole game. Here we have this twist that’s been built up for literally half of the game, AND was used as the main selling point, and it doesn’t do anything interesting with it.
What’s worse is how the switch to MV completely destroys this game’s previously very good pacing. Where the game would throw you from one area to the next and keep this gravy train going, the second half pulls the brakes HARD. Running from one area to the next is fine if you do it ONCE. If you have to do it over and over again, it gets real tedious real fast.
It’s really unfortunate just how inconsistent this whole experience is. Some levels are fun, others are tedious. Some are clever, others are just annoying. Levels feel like there’s no rhyme or reason to their structure, it’s just random platform challenge after platform challenge. What’s worse is that this game seemingly paid no attention to the fact that IF you’re going to make a Metroidvania without readily available fast travel you need to account for it by making the world efficiently traversable on foot. Getting anywhere takes bloody ages, and forces you through areas you’ve already cleared 20 times by this point. Other MVs understand this perfectly, deliberately designing their world specifically around it. The Messenger feels like somebody created a bunch of platforming levels and tried to retroactively and haphazardly create some “connection parts” between them. This would all be fine if the truly excessive amounts of backtracking in this game felt like there was ANY point to it. But it truly feels like more than half it could’ve been cut down if they just allowed you to fast-travel between checkpoints rather than letting you WALK through all of it again and again.
Something equally and annoying and tedious would be this game’s writing for me. Now, this truly is a matter of taste, and humour differs widely between people, but GODDAMN am I fucking sick and tired of “meta-humour”. I can’t stand it at this point. “BRO did you realise you’re actually playing a VIDEO GAME!?!?” Yes. Yes, I did. It’s one thing if the humour is actually clever and makes a point, like The Stanley Parable, or Undertale or even something like Hotline Miami. This just feels super uninspired and tired. I can honestly say I did not really enjoy the humour here, which is wild considering how much praise it got.
I wanna quickly talk about the boss fights, and highlight another design decision I really do not understand; the amount of waiting you have to do in ALL boss fights. All of them demand that you simply stand or walk around and avoid damage, without anything you can do to somehow cut down the time, or play more efficiently. To me, this is one of the golden rules of any combat system; NEVER rely on waiting as one the core mechanics of any fight. It’s boring at best, and downright infuriating if the boss is somehow difficult. Luckily I can say that the vast majority of bosses are very easy, and only took me about 5 tries at the most. The final boss in particular feels like an absolute joke considering what you fought before. The sad thing is that the combat system does feel nice and it could totally work, but it really IS the designs of the bosses themselves that are the issue here.
At least the game is quite short. I think I was done with all of it after 15-ish hours, I even went out of my way to gather as many collectibles I could be bothered with. I wanna say it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, but that wouldn’t be quite true, by the end I was kinda hoping for it to be over soon.
In conclusion, there will be certainly a lot of people that will really like this game. I’ll say that I noticed that there was a tendency for people that usually don’t really play MVs to like it, while the opposite seems to be true for people who are big fans of the MV genre. There is certainly a lot of love and passion in this game, it’s just sad that it all kind of ended up as a middling experience for me.
6 / 10