I was aware of The Messenger from playing it back at PAX, prior to the world ending. I played it on Switch when it first came out, and enjoyed the time I spent with it, but eventually bounced off because some of the floaty jump mechanics were a bit goofy and . . uhhh . . there were just way too many other games. I mean, seriously, go back and look at games released contemporaneously, skipping it was totally reasonable.

I caught half of a speedrun at AGDQ 2021, and remembered, “oh hey that was a good game, I should go back and finish it”. Then I saw it was out on GamePass too, so I could play it on the Series X.

So I did! And holy crap I bounced off this game right before it opens up! Like, I remember face-rolling through the giant golem boss and that was about it. I never made it to the 16bit area. I never made it to the open-world phase of the game.

This time I fixed all that, got everything in the base game except for the 3 missable “lecture” achievements and the ridiculous “make it through the first section with no deaths whatsoever” achievement.

It was pretty good! Great movement mechanics (save for the occasional ledge-grab screwup), great gimmick, soundtrack chock full of certified bangers, and pretty good difficulty that rewards mastery of the (sometimes wonky) mechanics. It was good enough that I’m considering going back for those few missable achievements, and after playing through some other stuff I’ll revisit the free DLC later in the year.

Only downside is that there were a couple absolute garbage rooms in the game. Just way too precise, needlessly tight timing, etc. At least the game is very quick about resetting and most of the time the really awful rooms are close to the pretty generous save points.