The Messenger begins as one game, then ends as another. Available Aug. 30 on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC, the adventure progresses like a nostalgic walking tour of 8- and 16-bit video game design. It’s a quick, playful and bumpy jaunt of a game that for better and worse does a spot-on impersonation of the games that inspired it.
The Messenger opens as a straightforward Ninja Gaiden tribute, drawn in 2D NES-style pixels. Our nameless blue ninja flips off platforms and walls, slicing hundreds of demons between point A and point B. An otherwise familiar dish, The Messenger is spiced with meta dialogue that’s just the right amount of twee, along with some challenging but hardly impossible boss fights. Our hero visits all the classic biomes — the swamp, the ice kingdom, the volcanic caverns — and eventually finds himself on the footsteps of the big-bad. This chunk of The Messenger would work on its own as the latest entry in the rapidly expanding retro demake catalogue, a sibling of games like Shovel Knight.
And now, a warning: We can’t discuss the rest of The Messenger without spoiling its big twist. This isn’t related to the story, and it’s hinted at heavily in the trailer and in demos during conventions like PAX.
The story of The Messenger doesn’t end after the final boss battle. In fact, the final boss battle isn’t remotely close to the final boss battle. Think of it like the end of the midpoint turn. The stakes are raised, the table is set all over again.
Instead of credits rolling, you see that the ninja gains new powers and all the previous locations are adorned with glowing rifts that, when entered, shift the ninja between two time frames — the past and the present, represented cheekily in 8- and 16-bit graphics, respectively. The initial linear path grows into a tree trunk from which new areas, once unreachable or hidden, branch outward. Various allies send you looping back and forth, acquiring even more powers that grant access to even more branches. In an instant, the ode to Ninja Gaiden morphs into the latest entry in the rapidly expanding modern Metroidvania catalogue, making The Messenger a sibling of games like Hollow Knight.
Taken as two complementary pieces, the end result is an airy and charming but hardly extraordinary ode to retro games. Neither of its two halves — retro demake and modern Metroidvania — rise to the quality of their contemporaries. The controls are too fussy in the first half, and the upgrades too slow to unlock in the second half. Its hurried pace, paperback fantasy through-line, and colorful world congeal into a throwback to rainy weekends in the 1990s spent barreling through an entire stack of whatever was available at the video game rental shop.
But taken holistically, The Messenger works as a Video Games 101 master class. The topic of the seminar: how video games changed between the NES and the SNES, and why trying to recreate or revisit that period is inherently precarious.
The Messenger’s 8-bit first half is burdened by many of the limitations of games from the late 1980s. Designers at that time had relied on difficulty and easy-to-learn gameplay to milk quarters from arcade patrons. New home consoles allowed artists to make more complex, forgiving and intentionally paced adventures. But change came slowly, so NES games still contained a lot of residual arcade-style design. The same goes for The Messenger’s intro, which imitates the era to a fault. Too often its linear action alternates between repetitive platforming and surprise difficulty spikes.
The Messenger’s creators find their footing in the second half, where the Metroidvania structure allows for greater creative wiggle room. Again, what’s happening inside the game echoes the medium’s history. Many of the 16-bit era’s best games delivered on the promise set by their 8-bit siblings, particularly entries in Metroid and Castlevania, where the additional graphical fidelity and system memory allowed for richer, more complex open environments.
You’ve probably already spotted the problem: The Messenger gets better with each hour, but that means that to reach its best moments, you have to muscle through some pretty familiar and blunt old-school game design. It’s a common problem for Metroidvanias, made worse by the fact that the game world doesn’t really expand until you complete a multi-hour prologue.
In the final few hours, The Messenger transcends both its inspirations with a gauntlet of challenges that make use of all the skills and tricks learned across the adventure. It’s thrilling when it works. On the pre-release Nintendo Switch copy I played for review, the game occasionally dropped to an unplayable frame rate in these hectic areas filled with enemies and environmental traps — only to stabilize after I rebooted.
The Messenger isn’t the first demake to fall into this trap, sticking too closely to a style of design that struggles to carry a full game in the present. What’s uniquely frustrating about The Messenger, though, is that the farther its creators get from the games they love, the greater the game becomes. The final few hours of the game are so weird and chaotic and joyful, and they have no clear connection to an iconic retro game. But that section also features the poorest performance, and it’s tempting to wonder whether, if Sabotage had spent less time focusing on the meticulous replication of old games, we’d have a stronger new one.
The Messenger spends too much of its time working its way from 1985 to the present. The game itself shifts between the past and the future, but for its sequel (and it certainly warrants one), I hope its creators aren’t afraid to embrace the now.
It’s tough to recommend The Messenger for fans of Metroidvanias or retro demakes when so many great options are available on the Switch. But for those of us who love gaming history, and the ways it still impacts games today, The Messenger is a shaggy but lovable adventure that shouldn’t be skipped as we enter the fall games deluge.
The Messenger was played using a final “retail” Nintendo Switch download code provided by publisher Devolver Digital. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.