The Messenger

At first I was enjoying my time with this game. The pixel art is gorgeous and the music is really good. Gameplay felt snappy from the get-go as well. Yet very quickly, things went downhill. I really don't like how dying and upgrades feel in this game, especially combined with how the game is designed in general. The knockback is comical with how it can send you flying across the screen under the right circumstances. Not a fan? There's an upgrade for that! Which feels like this game was designed backwards. Instead of having a solid foundation and building upon it, the game is designed to be frustrating, up until you unlock stuff to make it feel good. Ranged weapon? Upgrade. Mitigating the knockback? Upgrade. Enemies having a chance to spawn health/ammo? Yeah, you guessed it, locked behind an upgrade. And this is where another annoyance comes in. Whenever you die, there's a little "helpful" demon, who "saves you" by sending you back to the checkpoint... For a price, of course. So if you keep losing to bad luck clashing with the game made to be annoying intentionally, that little bastard will rob you of opportunities to get the upgrades quicker. The game also incentivizes exploration. Secrets are always fun to look for, but in many games that do hidden/alternate path, you're not getting penalized for trying to find them. Yet in this game, some pits look like there's a secret down a pit (like a random, otherwise useless platform in the middle of the room), yet you fall to your death and then you get punished for trying, due to the "helpful" demon collecting every penny you collect until he's satisfied. In general, it could be a fun game, but I was really disappointed to learn, that it's designed almost as if it was supposed to be annoying on purpose. There's definitely a ton of potential here, and I'm sure that people who like these types of games may find it really good. But for me, having annoying systems to remove other annoyances is not a good time.

Great soundtrack, fun dialogue, looks beautiful. I'd recommend the first third of the game if that was the entire thing; unfortunately the lack of quality of life when it comes to backtracking really soured the rest of the experience. It feels like it was so close to being a solid 9/10 game, but threw it all away to pad out the runtime.