The Messenger (2018)

Overall, The Messenger seems solid with great sprite work, solid controls, mostly fun music, and engaging mechanics with varied levels that present a good mixture of new and repeated obstacles.

My experience was mostly hampered by awful, desperate to be funny dialogue almost right out of the gate. Humor is subjective, so mileage will vary on this complaint, but hitting the player with a bunch of 4th wall breaking gags directly and early on in a game signals that no one is taking any of this seriously. The characters know it's a game and they'll remind you. This kind of gag might hit better snuck into a line of optional dialogue here or there somewhere but they just punch you with it multiple times near the jump. The approach to humor here definitely wasn't less is more, and the less subtlety the better.

The game knows it's a game and will remind you it's a game as a punchline over and over. It makes it hard to feel a sense of immersion and impact when plot twists and events start happening. I also found late game worldbuilding, lore, and jokes to feel more than a little clunky and unfunny. I think it all felt like a decent outline or first draft that didn't get enough revisions which is odd considering how polished some aspects of the game are like the gameplay.

The writing here makes me more than a little concerned for Sea of Stars, which as a JRPG, is going to depend a lot heavier on story and writing than an action platformer.

Pros:

+Great core gameplay and challenge. Bosses are a real highlight.

+Mostly great music, although some tracks just feel off enough to sound a bit obnoxious, as if the particular tones of the beeps and boops are just a pitch too blaring, or feature a loop that is too repetitive. I think the first stage and the shop theme are good examples of this. They don't play as nice on the ears as I think was intended. Later stage music is a lot more enjoyable however.

+Varied stages that are pretty to look at, with impressive sprites for many bosses and backdrops

Cons:

-Just generally bad to awful dialogue and writing. Some worldbuilding falls flat as well. Thank you reminding me about the video game tropes you put in your video game.

-Some questionable level design at times, with elements that felt more tedious to player advancement than enjoyable.

-Some bugs and performance issues at times, nothing too serious but curious framerate plunges, and a couple occasions where a boss fight behaved oddly, including one where the boss just stopped doing anything and I had to force a game over to try again and proceed.

-Some music tracks that just miss the mark. Coupling with comments inserted in the game to pat the developers on the back kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I'm not sure how else to feel about it.

The Messenger is platformer that has callbacks to the classic Ninja Gaiden. The games art style is beautiful and features a combination of 8 bit and 16 bit graphics. The moments of story and dialogue are great though relatively rare. The games controls feel solid and as the game progresses you get a variety of movement tool.

The difficulty for the first half feels excellent, the platforming is difficult but doesn't feel overly punishing. The boss fights are compelling and challenging without being overly difficult. Theres always new levels, upgrades, and enemies to deal with.

The game suffers somewhat in it's second half, the game abandons some of its linear nature and requires you to do some tedious backtracking. In addition the platforming starts to feel pretty punishing. Theres a lot of instant death conditions that require you to attempt an area again and again if you can't get the hang of a particular bit of platforming. To be fair this mitigated by the game's frequent checkpoints but it can still get pretty frustrating. Still the second half has some high points the boss fights are still pretty good and a few more levels are introduced to keep the game feeling fresh.

I'd say for me the game is more a of 3.5/5 than a 3. If you're a fan of platformers, its worth a playthrough. The game took me about twelves hours to beat and I'd describe my platformer ability as average at best.

Overall this was a pleaasant game. Some of the platforming was a bit hard at points, but more because I could execute what I knew I needed to do than because I didn't know what to do.

The fourthwall breaking is light and well paced, and the plot is...interesting.

I did feel like it started to drag a bit there at the end, but I think I was just ready to move on.

~David.

Update: 8/16/23

Just did a replay, and I loved it just as much. I was curious about some of the complaints I had read about the Metroidvania aspects, and I can totally understand them. The fast travel is horrific, getting around can be a huge chore. The humorous writing just ends and the pacing slows way down. But personally, I still loved it. Moving around is so fun, exploring and getting all the optional items, just feels great.

Anyways, still love this game a ton and can’t wait for Sea of Stars!!

—————

I have never been a big linear platformer fan, but this one changed that for me. I came to it for the metroidvania aspect (which I love how it was incorporated), but I really had a blast the whole time. It had some great modern sensibilities in the comedic meta writing and overall structure, but paired with responsive controls and great exploration, it was pretty next level.

Only cons were- the backtracking was a bit tedious, and the DLC was pretty unbalanced. The regular game had the perfect difficulty level, to where it was never totally frustrating or undoable. The DLC was entirely unforgiving, with no let-ups. It was obviously made for hardcore platform gamers, but it was too drastically difficult from the main game that it didn’t seem logical.

But yea, I recommend even if you aren’t super into the genre. Super unique!

I went into The Messenger blind, which in retrospect is the best way to have played it. You play as a Ninja, tasked to deliver a scroll to the eastern end of an island (an elegant way to justify the left-to-right progression). The game is a linear platformer here, with impressively precise controls. There are challenging sections, but it never feels too hard, or too random. In most cases, a little more precision - in movement and in timing - will see you through the challenge.

After a few hours, you reach the eastern end of the island, and then something interesting happens. The game expands its scope and turns into a metroidvania. The first item you get at this point is a map, which is actually the scroll you've been carrying around. The game's sense of humour is illustrated by one of the characters remarking on this event: "You carried this scroll to the literal end of the world and didn't even bother looking at it?".

Unfortunately, this change turns the gameplay into something that isn't quite as precise as the first half. There is a significant amount of backtracking involved, which is further complicated by time portals/rifts. Essentially, each level exists in the present and in the future, and you need to arrive at specific points while in a specific era. This makes the journey unnecessarily complicated, and it can get somewhat tedious at times. The challenge level is also ramped up in these later stages, which can make things frustrating.

Despite its shortcomings, The Messenger is still worth playing. The visuals are amazing, the soundtrack is great, the level of challenge is perfect, and the game has a good sense of (occasionally fourth-wall breaking) humour. My playthrough ran for about 14 hours. I do wish it was a few hours shorter, but I still had a blast playing through it.

P.S.: A previous status post of mine generated some discussion about this game referring to Jordan Peterson, who is a controversial figure. This reference exists, but it is fairly out of the way in a normal playthrough. The in-game shop has a cabinet that the shopkeeper states is off-limits. At one point of the game, if you inspect the cabinet several times, the shopkeeper will go into a philosophical monologue about words from 'Jordan the Wise'. The monologue itself seems harmless, and it can be watched on YouTube.

This game completely blew me away. It had already received good reviews and buzz from what I had seen so going into it I had high expectations. And it still didn't let me down.

While the game made me roll my eyes a bit in the beginning it constantly continued to get better and better and I was left enthralled by the end.

I love Ninja Gaiden and this game where's it's influence on its sleeve. At least for the first half of the game. Tight controls and nimble platforming make for a very enjoyable experience. My one problem with the first half of the game is the jokes about retro games or breaking the fourth wall. It's a well worn trope at this point in indie games and I don't find it cute or endearing anymore. With that being said, the writing was really good overall! And even some things I rolled my eyes on earlier ended up coming back full circle to make me smile and appreciate its thought out plot a lot more.

As you probably already know if you've seen this game in action, at one point (about halfway) the game changes from an 8 bit action platforming game to a 16 bit metroidvania. The story shoots through the roof and the gameplay gets a refresh. It's amazing to me how genuinely well this ends up working for the game.

Everything in this game moved and meshed so we'll together. Hopping in and out of time and the music and the graphics changing on the fly was all so deftly done that you can't help but smile. Everything about this game just hit right for me.

And the difficulty is spot on. It's hard. For sure. But it's not ridiculously hard or feel unfair like Celeste. Speaking of Celeste I can't believe people think that's a better game than this. To me it isn't even close. Celeste felt like you just needed to get lucky eventually on a jump or a dash, instead of understanding the game more and naturally getting better at it, which is what The Messenger feels like. It's executed masterfully.

Sabotage has worked its way into being one of my favorite developers after this game. I was excited for Sea of Stars before I played this game, but now it can't come soon enough.

If this is a genre you enjoy this is a 100% must play.

I played this one on a whim; my husband had downloaded it on Gamepass and played some of it (up to the gameplay change) and thought I might like it, and my new Castlevania games were still shipping so I had some time on my hands.

Some great things about this game:

1. The gameplay. It is so intuitive, and so much fun. It is challenging, but it was very rarely frustrating to me. Several times I got to a boss, thought "ugh, this is probably going to be a slog," and then was surprised when it was not a slog, but instead was very fun. The bosses tend toward the puzzle-boss-y, as opposed to the bullet-hell or execution-challenge style, which I like - I prefer my platformers heavily skewed toward the platforming with relatively quick and easy bosses, as opposed to Megaman X - style short-ish levels with super challenging bosses. There are also lots of secrets to find, but there's a way to get them to show up on your map, which I really like (I prefer to be able to see where I've missed something if I've missed it.)
2. The sense of humor. This game is hilarious. Seriously. It's not just goofy, it's actually really, really funny. And that makes it especially fun.
3. Beautiful pixel art! And really good 8-bit music! I do have a complaint about the music, though: it's great before the gameplay change, but post-gameplay-change, it's too intense. It would be great if the game were still just a platformer, but when it's a Metroidvania and you're going back through the same room over and over again looking for secrets, the music gets reaaaaaaaalllllllllll annoying real fast. It needed to be more atmospheric.

Downsides: Story gets super weird post-gameplay change and it doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense?

It was WELL worth playing! I loved it and was sad when it was over.

I wrote a review in spanish because it just hit PS4. You can read it here: https://gamerfocus.co/juegos/the-messenger-resena/

If you can't read spanish, let me give you the main points: It's an amazing game with beautiful pixel art and great music (in both 8-bits and 16-bits styles). The controls are precise and the 'cloudstep' mechanic is gamechanging, allowing for very hard but satisfying platforming sections. The plot is nothing to write home about, but it has a lot of great humor.

Sadly, not everything is that great. Not all jokes work, the skill tree is kinda mediocre and the second half of the game is not that good. After the midpoint, The Messenger abandons its linear structure for a 'metroidvania' style, but the level designs is still (mostly) the same, so it becomes boring and kinda frustrating traveling the same scenarios again and again.

It's still a great game. It's a shame that it could be almost perfect if not for the metroidvania twist. It just can compete with the level design of Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge and other games like those.

Pales in comparison to the likes of Hollow Knight, Steamworld Dig 2, Celeste, Super Meatboy, VVVVVV, and Deadcells. Hell, even the End is Nigh, which I wasn't personally a big fan of, was a better experience than The Messenger.

This game can't decide whether it wants to be a linear, challenge based platformer or a metroidvania with light (and I mean light) puzzle elements. As a result it spectacularly fails at both, making for a lukewarm gameplay experience.

Poorly thought out level design is the biggest issue holding this game back from greatness. During the linear section of the game, each level feels all too easy; this is because, unbeknownst to the player, each level is actually meant to be traversed multiple times in a metroidvania-esque fashion. Because of this, the difficulty for each individual section must be kept low so that backtracking through them isn't a chore. However, there are occasional challenge sections, which makes sense for linear level design, but are a complete pain to backtrack through.

Backtracking in this game, in general, is a pain. The game is split into levels, which are split into linear segments, each of which having exactly one entrance and one exit (with a few exceptions). This sort of design is not conducive to "metroidvania" style of backtracking, but these devs REALLY wanted backtracking. So what did they do? They give us a hub-like zone halfway through the game, at which point you're tasked with solving some mildly cryptic riddles which point you towards going back to certain levels. This hub gives you the option to use, in a way that I can only describe as snide, fast travel portals, but only to a select few levels, which artificially forces the feeling of metroidvania exploration. What I mean by this is, say you need to go check out zone 1 again, well the closest we can warp to is to zone 2, so great, let's traverse through zone 2 -> zone 1 and find what we needed. Now let's go back to the nearest zone 1 checkpoint, and guess what, we can instantly warp back to the hub-zone! That's right, every checkpoint allows for one way warping back to the hub, which just feels inconsistent and contrived given the way the hub portals work. Unfortunately, this is the style of "exploration" that the game offers. It's neither fun nor engaging.

The only difference between the first time you run through the levels and the backtracking portion of the game is that a few of the rooms are slightly redesigned and offer tangential mini-platforming sections to go through. These new paths almost always lead to a dead end containing one of the collectables (which are used to unlock a certain something that turns out to be completely underwhelming).

Don't get me wrong, I loved the basic gameplay mechanics, as they allow for some really interesting gameplay challenges, but it's as if the developers were too scared to actually design obstacles that specifically take advantage of these fun, and potentially deep mechanics (except for the wall jumping/clinging mechanic, this one needed work—the fact that you auto cling to walls the second you brush against one instead of just sliding down them is a baffling decision to me; it feels bad and completely ruins the flow of gameplay. You can't even release from the wall in an intuitive way. One would think that simply pressing in the opposite direction of the wall would let you let go from it, but no, you either have to jump or hold down and jump. The only reason I can think of why they kept the wall climbing mechanics like this, rather than some sort of variation of Celeste's incredibly well-realized wall climb mechanics/control scheme, is that the auto cling makes some platforming sections easier, despite the fact that more often than not it just gets in the way of playing the game).

Another complaint is that there are almost no platforming obstacles that actually require the player to have any sort of mastery over the game's mechanics. On top of that, the game has an inconsistent difficulty curve and is plagued with awkward checkpoint placement, cheap deaths due to off screen hazards, and boring/un-fun boss fights (who are the biggest offenders of the inconsistent difficulty. Oh, and don't forget the random, incredibly tedious SHMUP boss fight that comes out of nowhere).

I personally can't recommend this game. The visuals are fantastic as well as the OST and humorous writing, but that's it—speaking of OST, the sound design in regard to gameplay was bad; there were no sound cues for moving obstacles/platforms, making timing your movement entirely dependent on visual cues. It sounds like a minor nitpick, but good sound design makes for more natural and intuitive gameplay.