The Messenger asks you to deliver a scroll. It ends with you carrying the weight of every Messenger who came before you, and the trick is that the game knew this all along.
Trailer, via Sabotage Studio.
A Ninja Leaves His Village
Sabotage Studio’s 2018 action platformer opens as a straight homage to Ninja Gaiden. You run, jump and swing a sword as the eponymous ninja, appointed by a great hero to carry a sacred scroll east to the top of a mountain. A blue-robed shopkeeper sells upgrades. Time Shards drop from enemies and buy new tricks, including the Cloudstepping move that grants a mid-air jump after a strike.
Die, and a demon named Quarble revives you at the last checkpoint, then follows you and skims your Time Shards as payment. It is a small, deadpan tax on failure.
The Past Runs at 8-Bit
The first half is linear. The past looks and sounds 8-bit; the future is 16-bit. Then The Messenger reveals itself as a Metroidvania, and you revisit both eras in any order, using warps to shift the layout of each level. Forty-five hidden green medallions wait as optional objectives.
Lead designer Thierry Boulanger prototyped the game in 2008, drawing on Ninja Gaiden and Chrono Trigger. Composer Eric “Rainbowdragoneyes” Brown wrote every track twice, once per era. Sabotage crunched to dodge AAA press competition.
The Scroll Was Built by Phantom
The plot earns its structure. Sent 500 years forward, the Messenger beats the Demon King’s general, circles the globe, and arrives at his own village from the west. He realizes he has become the Western Hero, hands the scroll to a soldier, and joins the blue-robes as a merchant.
The scroll, it turns out, was built by Phantom, a man cursed by the Demon King. The curse links the world to the demon realm every 500 years, and the scroll’s time magic sustains an endless cycle of Messengers.
The Genre Switch Is the Story
The Messenger’s best idea is that its own transformation is the plot. The 8-bit-to-16-bit leap is not decoration; it is the Messenger’s journey made playable, and the Metroidvania turn pays it off.
The crunch and the 2008 prototype show in the seams, but the humor holds and Brown’s doubled soundtrack is the kind of work few studios attempt.
KEY FACTS
– Release: August 30, 2018 (Windows, Nintendo Switch)
– Also on: PlayStation 4 (2019), Xbox One (2020)
– Developer: Sabotage Studio; publisher: Devolver Digital
– Sold over 50,000 copies in one week
– Score: 8.7/10
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