A game critic type once Posted on Twitter they’d take how a videogame made someone feel over mechanical jargon every single time. Of course they’re
A fool. An absolute rube: the only way to appreciate videogames is mechanically. In 2020, that’s what we’re sticking to. Emotions? Feeling?
Garbage, worthless.

Of course I’m sort of half joking. I’m joking about the fact that this person probably has had to play a dozen Narrative Simulations during isolation.
Games sure are art, especially when they’re made by people who couldn’t finish writing a book. The best videogames let you kick turn a motorcycle off of someone’s face,
or chain eighteen wall jumps together without touching the ground.
Actually: please send us your game if you can beat it without ever touching the ground.

ISOLATION has me thinking about videogames that make me feel a particular way. The days chain together, and it doesn’t seem to matter what time I wake up.
My afternoons can happen at 5pm, after all, just as easily as 12pm. This is the story for everyone I know that isn’t working. I see a dozen jokes every day on The Twitter about how Gamers the best prepared for this.
We are the people who are most willing to while away our time, after all. Yet there’s tremendous fear we aren’t, that we may finally have to look inside ourselves.

The secret to isolation isn’t just playing videogames, dummy. It’s knowing which ones are fully capable of letting you disappear inside of them. If you try to simply pass the time by sinking deep into a Call of Duty coma; the realization when you look to the world outside will be terrifying. All of this time spent for killstreaks that do not carry over. Endless amounts of people you’ve told to “fuck off”. That’s no way to vanish inside a hole of the digital.

THE MESSENGER is best played from start to finish. A Ninja Game, a retro-throwback (but to which area might surprise you) and the type of thing you play in your room with an open window. The open window is there in case you need to smoke a cigarette. Developed by the Qubecois Sabotage Studio, it is fully of love and all of those primary emotions we can’t stop writing about. A true pastry for the soul: a hearty balanced breakfast of crunchy vidcon delight.

None of the love in the hearts of the developers really matters to Play The Messenger. It is carefully crafted to represent a specific era of tight and rewarding platformer games. Ninja Gaiden is everyone’s immediate reference, but there’s a little Turrican in here too. These are the games that defined an era which coined terms like “quarter muncher” even after we had moved mostly to home consoles. If you are an adult child who posts things like “they just don’t make them like they used to!” The Messenger is splendid proof they do (a long with a dozen other videogames! why are you!).

That is as glowing as we can be, but let me tell you something: It is possible in many screens of The Messenger to never touch the ground. You can rope-dart your way from one enemy to another, jumping in midair and grappling a wall to momentarily give yourself pause. Whirl the best of those Ninja Platformer delights, the Windmill Shuriken, however you’d like. If that is not as glowing as we could possibly be to get you, the gamer, to buy this: I don’t know. Go play Animal Crossing – a game someone got paid to say “was for babies”. Who are you going to trust: someone paid by a corporation, or us?

WHY NOW? Because maybe you have a weekend to spare and you’d like to support someone else’s dream. Maybe, you’re hyper focusing because that’s the only alternative to drugs and alcohol. Some or all of these things could be true, if you’re us. Rest assured: Deep-Hell dot com never “parties” or “has fun”.

The Crunchiest videogames are the best to play at times like these, because they deserve and ask for time in a way that others just don’t. A 60 hour RPG will force you to give up those sixty hours. The Messenger wants to ask for time to make you good. I am happy that nothing in this videogame markets itself that way. I am happy every time a videogame doesn’t get a “Prepare to die” edition, as if the fact that it is difficult is the only interesting thing about it.

Difficulty alone should never be the sole choice for why you like something. Every seething nerd upset that someone dare reference a specific medieval videogame and difficulty is right, but not for the reasons they think. Like the person who said “mechanical writing can never be interesting” they’re right, but for the wrong reasons. On any given day these people are stupid. Maybe – maybe every day of their life.

The Messenger and it’s vocabulary are familiar ones: Jump, Slash, Throw. Movement is a triangle and all mechanics stem from being permutations of that. Jump and slash, together, allow you to jump again. Throw becomes throw rope dart, chaining into another form of jumping and slashing. And so on. But the slashing feels right. Slash twice quickly and there is a noticeable brief pause. It allows the player to chain a combo together without a gigantic graphic popping up and saying: GOOD JOB!. The “pat on the back” is not dying. Before we started writing this, it was about a game that told us GOOD JOB so many times we uninstalled it.

Some things are perfect for quarantine and isolation because they allow you to be roped into a specific mood or world. Some demand time in a different way. Not the fleeting haze of a dream, but engagement. All three days it took me to beat The Messenger I would frequently lay awake in bed, wondering how it killed me and why. With the opportunity to go back to previous areas, I would attempt challenges just to tell myself I could.
There is a fantasy world buried here, and a story that can be engaging. It is rarely as important as the genius moment of finding out I could do that. Maybe that was killing a boss without taking a single hit. often, it was something as simple as finding a faster route through a screen.

The unbreakable flow of platformer videogames – You Can’t Touch Me.

QUALITY: 5/5
RISK OF INFECTION: 1/5