The Messenger — No More Jokes, Please.
An enjoyable indie platformer ruined by its miserable attempts at humor
I’d like to take a moment and directly address any Canadians who may be reading my review. Try not to take this the wrong way, but have you ever considered the possibility that you’re just not very funny? Because after playing through Night in the Woods [2017], Guacamelee [2013], Guacamelee 2 [2018], and Celeste [2018], and now The Messenger, I’m beginning to notice a pattern among Canadian-made video games. To wit, they all think they’re hilarious when their humor is just tedious. So, I think it’s high time for Canadian game developers, as a class, to do a bit of soul searching and reflection. I want you to pause and ask yourself, are you really funny? Really? When you make jokes IRL do people laugh genuinely or do they just chuckle politely and desperately look for an exit? I want you to understand that I don’t hate you guys, and while I’m frequently very critical of the games you make I do so because they are often on the verge of being downright excellent. If the levity is crucial to your game then tone it down a bit, you don’t need to bombard the player with jokes every spare moment, just put in one or two that are of the highest quality you can produce.
The Messenger is a good deal worse in this regard than the other games I mentioned (except for Guacamelee 2 [2018], which remains the all-time champion of unfunny Canadian indie games). For the first half of the game every boss fight, every ability unlock, and indeed every progression of any kind is littered with a barrage of these piss-poor “jokes.” It’s so bad that it quickly sapped any desire I had to advance in the game, as I knew that any significant success would be met with the developer’s tedious humor. This was annoying, but where it became downright intolerable when the game punctuated every death with another lame joke. Since The Messenger is not an especially easy game I quickly started to get repeats, which were unfunny the first few times and quickly grew to be downright insufferable. I really can’t overstate how fucking annoying this game would get with the jokes; we’re talking Gex: Enter the Gecko [1998] levels of comedic incompetence here. About the only good thing I can say is that at least there was no voice acting and you can skip through the text quickly without reading it.
As I mentioned in my review of Guacamelee 2 [2018], The Canadian tendency towards political correctness and leftist authoritarianism explains why their humor has become so abysmal in recent years. However, it does not explain why so many denizens of the People’s Republic of Canuckistan are so completely convinced they are hilarious when nothing could be further from the truth. Is this the natural result of the self-esteem culture in North America, where every unfunny dullard thinks they’re Norm Macdonald because nobody has ever dared to tell them to shut up? Or is there something more sinister at work? I’ll confess that I don’t know enough about our friendly neighbor to the north to know for sure, but whatever it is I hope they can work through it in the next decade or so.
Yet like Guacamelee [2013], The Messenger redeems itself in part because beneath all the “humorous” interludes there is a pretty solid knock-off of a classic video game. For Guacamelee [2013] it was Super Metroid [1994] and for The Messenger, it is Ninja Gaiden [1988]. The decision to base the game off of Ninja Gaiden [1988] shows a good deal of wisdom on the part of the developers. There is no point re-making a game that is damn near perfect, and many indie metroidvanias suffer when compared to absolute classics like Super Metroid [1994] or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night [1997]. However, remaking a game that has many good ideas and some excellent features, but significant technical flaws can be a fruitful exercise. All you need to do, as a developer, is to improve the art, fix the obvious issues, and steal the rest. Ninja Gaiden [1988], while an excellent game at the time of its release, has aged about as well as a herring left out in the sun. As a consequence, the marginal improvements that The Messenger offers are welcome.
The Messenger is, of course, a good deal easier than the original Ninja Gaiden [1988] (or any of it’s NES sequels for that matter), if only because there is no cheap-ass bullshit where enemies re-spawn continuously just as your about to make a jump. Moreover, there are no bird enemies (which, Ninja Gaiden [1988] taught me are ninja’s natural predators). That said, The Messenger is by no means an easy game. Like the classic Nintendo games that inspired it, success depends on pixel-perfect jumps, quick reflexes, and carefully honed muscle memory. The difference here is that unlike Ninja Gaiden [1988] there is no lives system and as a result no chance that you will be kicked back to the start of a level when you run out of continues. Instead, you will, at the very worse case, just be kicked back to your last checkpoint a few screens away. Some areas are still a pain in the ass to get past, but it never reaches the point of being outright aggravating.
However, about halfway through the game, The Messenger decides that it has had enough with being Ninja Gaiden [1988] and wants to be Super Metroid [1994] instead. So you’re kicked back into the main world of the game, given a map, and told to track down a variety of collectibles hidden somewhere across the vast map. Now, I’m a huge fan of metroidvanias in general, and I’ll always be a sucker for this particular formula, but The Messenger executes it in a half-ass fashion. The levels are all basically the same as before, only with a few previously inaccessible rooms opened up here and there. There is very limited interconnectivity between stages, so you’ll have to rely on teleporting back and forth from the main hub. For the most part, you’re just treading over the same old ground as before looking for the collectibles and secrets you missed the first time around. Once the game stops leading you along a linear path, you’re left to wander around the map with a few cryptic clues to figure out where to go next. This quickly started to get tedious and boring as I explored the few new areas only to discover useless collectibles and dead ends. It’s as if the game just plops you down into the boring middle section of a classic metroidvania where you have a huge map to traverse and no idea where to go. After a while, I quickly gave up trying to solve the riddles on my own and just looked up a guide on what to do next. That improved the experience a bit but is hardly a testament to the integrity of the game’s design.
On the same note, the Story falls apart in the game’s second half as well. In the first half, we’re given a rather neat, cyclical story where each Messenger travels across the land and into the future before giving the sacred scroll to the next Messenger in line. The sacred scroll is mysterious at the start, all you know about it is that it is key to holding off the ravages of an ancient and dangerous curse. This makes for a wonderful, albeit it, somewhat depressing, story where evil is never defeated but the human spirit endures despite it. It would be an unconventional narrative for the genre, no doubt, where you are not so much destined hero as temporary custodian, but this is exactly the sort of narrative experiments I would like indie games to tackle. Unfortunately, the next Messenger inline dies (due to, what else, another lame joke), and you’re left holding the bag trying to break the curse that has plagued the world for untold generations. The other issue is that aside from knowing that the curse is bad, you don’t know anything about it or where it comes from. This is only explained in any detail by a cut-scene right before the final level! This really should have been something we were clued into a bit earlier, or at least hinted at in some way because as it stands I spent most of the second half of the game with no understanding of or appreciation for the game’s stakes. Indeed, I barely even knew what I was supposed to be doing half the time.
Still, despite some serious shortcomings in terms of narrative, the game is as gorgeous a work of pixel art as any I’ve seen. I especially like the way that the game starts off using NES-style graphics and then transitions to using SNES-style graphics when you go into the future. Both look spectacular in their own ways but are crisp and distinct enough so that you immediately know what time you are in. It neatly sidesteps the issue I had with Guacamelee [2013] where I was never really sure if I was in the land of the living or the land of the dead.
The developers invested a lot of care into the superficial design of their game while neglecting the overall structure. The result is a game that is flashy and engaging but quickly outstays its welcome. With a few fewer jokes, a reworking of the plotline, and a more tightly scripted second half this could have been an excellent game. As it stands, it’s just mediocre.
