In a gaming space that's becoming increasingly crowded with
intentionally retro-styled 2D platformers, Sabotage Studio's The
Messenger is daring to do things a little differently.
Instead of taking its inspiration from Mega Man, Super
Mario Bros., DuckTales, and/or Castlevania like so many
others have, The Messenger instead presents itself as a callback
to Tecmo's original Ninja Gaiden trilogy for the NES.
That would be a unique enough approach on its own, but The
Messenger brings one other well-publicized gimmick to the table
as well: a time-warping mechanic that allows you to travel between
the 8-bit world you start out in and a SEGA Genesis-styled 16-bit
world in order to open new paths forward and progress through
the game.
But are these factors enough to make The Messenger stand out from the crowd?
The Messenger wastes no time dropping you right into the action
with a brief cutscene introducing you to the game's hero, a
nameless young ninja living in a small village housing what
remains of the human race.
It turns out an army of demons has already wiped out most of humanity, and legend
says the demon army is bound to strike again and finish the
job.
And strike again it does, with our ninja protagonist's village going
up in flames as the Demon King and his minions launch their
assault ahead of schedule.
The fledgling ninja is then trusted with an important task: to carry a scroll vital
to his clan's survival across the land and deliver it to the peak
of the highest mountain.
From there it's up to you to guide our unlikely hero to his
destination as you run, jump, wall climb, and slash your way
across the land.
As you progress you'll pick up some new equipment granting you additional methods
of traversal, such as a Wingsuit that gives you a little more air
time and lets you glide over chasms and into updrafts, as well as
a Rope Dart that functions much like a Zelda game's Hookshot
and pulls you toward whatever surface it makes contact with.
There's also the Cloudstep, a key gameplay mechanic introduced
in the game's opening moments that combines traversal with
combat in a smart, elegant way.
Essentially, whenever you strike an enemy or background object with your sword
while airborne, you gain an additional jump, and this quickly
becomes required in order to make it across large chasms and other
such environmental hazards.
As you might imagine, The Messenger wastes little time in coming
up with devious ways to test your Cloudstepping skills, combining
white-knuckle platforming over spikes and bottomless pits with
light environmental puzzle-solving as you plan your Cloudstepping
while considering the placement of the enemies and strikable
background objects around you.
Fortunately the game's controls are mostly up to the task, proving
slick and responsive whether you're playing in TV or handheld
mode.
Being a 2D platformer, playing with the Switch Pro
Controller or anything else equipped with a D-pad is naturally
going to be your best bet here, but playing with the Joy-Con L's
control stick works well enough too if such is your only option.
I do wish the buttons could be remapped to make certain
combinations of actions easier on the hands, as there are
challenging Cloudstepping sequences later in the game that
require some real finger gymnastics to get through, and this
could've been alleviated with some simple custom control options.
That minor control quibble aside, The Messenger just feels good to
play in general, and making your way through the various stages
and overcoming their myriad platforming challenges is both
rewarding and a great deal of fun.
Boss fights are another real highlight, often incorporating Cloudstepping
while testing your ability to suss out patterns and react to
them appropriately — but never feeling overly difficult or unfair.
If you think all of this sounds like it makes for a strong action
platformer, you'd be right.
And if that was the only role The Messenger was concerned with playing, this
could've been a very open-and-shut review with praise to spare.
Unfortunately, once you reach a certain point later in the game
The Messenger suddenly puts the brakes on its otherwise
brisk pacing and decides it wants to be an open-ended, exploratory
Metroid-style
platformer instead, and this is where the warts begin to show.
Following this change in focus, you'll suddenly find yourself
returning to all the levels you just completed in order to find and
explore new areas within them, the purpose of this endeavor being
to gather collectibles that are necessary in order to unlock the
path to the endgame.
And this in itself wouldn't be so bad, except that it quickly becomes apparent that as an
action platformer, these levels were not designed to be traversed
multiple times forward and backward.
And you will be traversing them many, many times, because the
amount of backtracking this part of the game requires borders on
absurd.
So not only are The Messenger's levels a lot more fun to
barrel through as an action platformer than they are to explore in a
slower-paced Metroid-style adventure to begin with, you'll be
revisiting them all several times as you make your way to various
destinations that are often just far enough from any fast travel
point that it feels like a real chore to get there.
After all, you've already seen and done everything on the way —
oftentimes more than once.
Indeed, The Messenger's poor excuse for a fast travel system does very little
to alleviate the amount of backtracking associated with the back half
of the game, with nothing meaningful to differentiate repeated
runs through levels or sections of a level.
There is an upgrade tree you're constantly collecting currency to
buy power-ups from, which does help make all the backtracking
feel slightly less meaningless as your ninja continues to power up,
and all this covering old ground does eventually lead to another
handful of brand-new areas to explore.
But that still doesn't take the sting out of all the backtracking and
level re-runs required to get there, only adding to the feeling that
The Messenger would have been better off as a pure action platformer
without the shoehorning-in of slower-paced, Metroid-style
exploratory elements.
It's also a shame that this change in overall focus comes hand-in-
hand with the introduction of The Messenger's widely publicized
time travel mechanic, which changes the game's aesthetics
between 8-bit and 16-bit on the fly.
This is a legitimately cool gimmick whose luster never quite wears off,
but whose impact is lessened considerably thanks to the myriad
frustrations introduced alongside the game's stark change
in pacing coming from the first half of the game.
Touching on those frustrations a bit further, while The Messenger
wisely eschews a lives-based system in favor of simply kicking
you back to a checkpoint whenever you die, those checkpoints are
sometimes spaced far enough apart that an accidental death can
feel more frustrating than it needs to due to all the ground you
have to cover to get back to where you were — ground you've
likely already covered before, to boot.
But no matter how many times you have to trek through an area, at
least you'll thoroughly enjoy all the sights and sounds every single
time.
Sabotage Studio really went the extra mile in terms of making
both the 8-bit and 16-bit sides of The Messenger true to their
respective eras, with the latter being especially memorable in
terms of how specifically evocative it is of the SEGA Genesis style
of 16-bit gaming.
This is especially true of the soundtrack, which transitions
seamlessly between NES-style and Genesis-style versions of the
same songs as you phase between the two time periods.
The game's composer Eric Brown, also known as
Rainbowdragoneyes, deserves special mention for expertly crafting
these two very distinct versions of the game's soundtrack,
both of which go a long way toward conveying the overall vibe
of their respective era.
And the visuals are no slouch either.
The retro-styled graphics look great whether you're playing on a TV
or on the Switch's screen in handheld mode, and the action all
takes place at a consistently smooth 60 frames per second.
There was an issue present in the review build where the frame
rate would sometimes drop below 60 fps after four hours or more
of continuous play, and while I did encounter this bug I've been
assured that it's been fixed for the retail build of the game.
It's also worth noting that The Messenger lays claim to some
genuinely inspired writing and characterization that caused me to
chuckle and even laugh out loud more than once.
The story and overall writing are somewhat reminiscent of
Shovel Knight in the way the game doesn't take itself too seriously
but still manages to tell an engaging story with emotionally resonant
moments.
There's also a veritable slew of references and Easter
eggs to uncover in the dialogue, which is a ton of fun for players
like myself who enjoy those kinds of details.
Significant though The Messenger's problems in pacing and focus
are, especially after the excellent first half of the game, they don't
bring the game down so much that it isn't worth playing.
Quite the contrary, I LIKE The Messenger and don't
regret the time I've spent with the game, which clocks in at a surprising
20-ish hours for a first playthrough and ensures that you're
getting good bang for your buck.
And if you want to find and destroy the 50 optional
Power Seals that stand between you and the game's true ending,
you can expect to add a good five to 10 hours on top of that.
The issue is simply that The Messenger is a good 20 hour game
when it could've been a great 10-hour game.
Had Sabotage Studio remained focused on keeping The Messenger
squarely within the action platformer genre, a tighter, more streamlined
experience playing entirely to the game's strengths
could have been the result.
But the introduction of Metroid-style open-ended exploration
alongside the gimmick of shifting between the 8-bit and 16-bit eras
hurts the game's pacing and puts the focus on backtracking and
other slower-paced exploratory elements rather than where it
should've remained, which is the game's strong, Ninja Gaiden-
style action platforming.
But neither can the strength of that core
gameplay be denied, cementing The Messenger as a good game
that, despite its faults, is worth playing for fans of the genre — but
nothing more.
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