The Messenger

Not a terrible game. Not great either. There are some good ideas and the platforming is pretty good for the most part. But there are parts that are outright frustrating such as a couple of areas where you want to study the room but you end up getting sniped from something which knocks you into a death pit. This game also looves to pad its time by making you back track A LOT. Worth a playthrough if you like pixel based sidescrollers but not worth replaying.

The game has amazing visuals and great music, but the gameplay is tedious and controls feel as dated as the games from the era they so masterfully emulate with visuals and sound. The story is fun and has some very enjoyable twists, as well as great sense of humor. And although it outstays its welcome, completing it was still a blast. Gameplay alone I would rate at 3 stars at best, but I can't bring myself to give it less than 4. The rest of the package is just too good.

The Messenger starts out as an 8-bit action platformer and then morphs into a metroidvania around a third of the way through. Very fun mechanics with witty dialogue and satisfying gameplay. Definitely recommended if you're into retro throwbacks.

If you've played at some point in your life with the NES, had a game named ninja gaiden and never be able to beat it but it was a fun game even though it was hard. Here The Messenger is ninja gaiden Rebirth into a new generation with balancing diffculty and funny text dialog with a story of a young trainy ninja that hope to see the world and beyond the island he lives on. However things do not turn out the way the young ninja hope to be as oni demon's have come to kill all humans left on earth. You the young ninja are given task to deliver a message to great beings to save his master and his friends.

I would definitely recommend this game to anybody who has any interest in retro-style action platformers, but during my time with the game there were three flaws that I couldn't really overlook. The first one is that this game is weirdly easy. While I don't mind playing games that don't pose too much of a challenge, this game constantly gives the feeling that it was designed with a much more restrictive control scheme. Many threatening-looking rooms can be breezed past, either because a very easy to acquire ability (such as slashing projectiles) will allow you to trivialize any challenge or because the game just provides you more safe ground or walls to grab onto than you would expect. By the end of the game the level of challenge approached what you would encounter in the earlier stages of Shovel Knight. The second one is that the writing is pretty bad. 95% of the game is fourth wall breaking about videogame tropes, and the story-dump at the end of the game reads like it was jotted down in 5 minutes. The last one can be considered a spoiler, so stop reading if you don't want to know too much about the game. Bear in mind that I still recommend it. When the game reveals its true nature, so to speak, it provides way too few warping points considering the kind of backtracking you need to do. Some of the "quest lines" are also incredibly convoluted and non-intuitive, you basically have to stumble upon the right track to get the thing that will ultimately allow you to proceed further. I was lucky in this regard, but had I not been the game would have probably been really frustrating. All in all I had a lot of fun with this game, but some of the design decisions were just baffling to me. I'll definitely keep an eye on the developer to see if their next project improves upon this promising foundation while removing the kinks.