The Messenger

It starts throwing cheap one hit deaths at you with enemies who teleport around and shoot through walls. You don't get a full health bar upon death, nor do you get your shuriken back. Baffling decision. I'm not going to whine about hard games, my favorite games of all time are things like Ghostrunner and Hotine Miami. The problem is this game isn't like those and then it flips a switch and feels cheap because of it's own set expectations that it's going to play fair. It's not helped by what was once a cute little game over screen repeatedly shoved in your face upon every death with text you will never read. I'm really not sure what happened here. It's gameplay whiplash and left me frustrated despite having fun for the most part.

the onyl game on GOG with trouble to detect my controllers., at one is running but nedding to press 2 botton for a double jumps is annoying, its same it looks like a fun game

I played for 30 min and I already love it. A few things you should be aware of though: - The game doesn't support other resolutions than 16:9 and I doubt that will change: the enemies are NES style, they respawn when they are out of sight, very much like Ninja Gaiden on NES indeed. - The game support only xinput controllers (XBox 360). To play with a generic controller you have 2 possibilities: 1. add the game to your Steam's library and use the overlay to map your gamepad to xinput 2. install x360ce ( https://github.com/x360ce/x360ce ), start it, rename the DLL to xinput1_4.dll, and configure your controller Now for the review and my title: - definitely Ninja Gaiden inspired: the controls are tight, you mostly use the katana, the wall jump is very similar - a bit like Wonder Boy: it has RPG elements: you collect money, you buy skills in shops, you can go back where you came from - a bit like Sonic: you collect crystal instead of rings and some moving platforms are definitely classic to a Sonic game The double jump is weird. You need to hit something first and then you can double jump. Exactly like they do on the video, you *have* to use your katana to double jump. A very strange decision in my opinion... The story is fun and contains some meta dialogs. For example the protagonist is capable to say that a text is too long because "it fills the entire text box". There is no damsel in distress, good, no sexism so far. But there is no woman at all either. Music and sounds are all 8-bit style. Very good. Graphics are more 16-bit. I suggest playing on a screen with very low latency even though the beginning is very easy, I expect a much higher difficulty to come.

As you may have read in the game description, the game starts out as a platformer and halfway through suddenly turns into a Metroidvania. The first half is really fun, but man, when the Metroidvania portion kicks in... what a bore! It literally consists of going on a VERY long trip from point A to point B to pick up a random object that you just don't care about. I love Metroidvania-style games, but not this one! After 15 hours of play, I just can't take these long, endless distances any more. The game control is very good overall, as are the retro graphics. However, the music gets on your nerves. It's well composed, but with the annoying sound of NES-era games. It's a shame that this game is ruined by this poorly thought-out 2nd half.

Good game, but buggy. And it's especially frustrating when the mechanics you've relied on all game start failing at critical times. Looking at you grappling hook.