The Messenger Review

Phew, it seems that the guys at Dreamcatcher Games spent several last months on steroids. Just look at the number of games they published recently, or are about to publish: Nightlong, Beyond Atlantis, The Forgotten, were just the beginning of an avalanche continued by: Riddle of the Sphinx, Dracula Resurrection, The Messenger, and many more...

The Messenger had been developed in cooperation with the union of French museums Index+, France Telecom Multimedia and Canal+ Multimedia. This is why you shouldn't be much surprised if you stumble upon this game labeled: Louvre: The Ultimate Curse or Louvre: L'Ultime Malédiction... Whatever the case, you'll be playing the role of Morgan Sinclair, a secret service feamle agent who got a perilous mission to find 4 artifacts called 'Satan's Keys' in the Louvre. These four artifacts are based on the four elements of the Apocalypse that had been conjured by the Black Templars in the XIV century and are capable of causing complete global annihilation! The good thing is that one of the artifacts got stolen, and the bad news is that it has been put on display in the Louvre, and that the remaining members of the Black Templar Brotherhood still want to get their hands on it...

So, our lethal agent Morgan sets on her crusade through the corridors of the Louvre in the classic Pink Panther-like style: in a black suit, equipped by a crossbow and other handy gadgets.

Now, if this review happens to be the first thing you ever read about this game, you'd probably think that it is some kind of a Tomb Raider clone. Fortunately, this game has nothing to do with jumping about old temples and forests, killing large numbers of dumb animals, and having some nice legs and tits on screen all the time (pity about this last thing) as this is actually an adventure game.

So, you'll spend the entire game trying to find the articles in the Louvre. To make things a bit more interesting the authors decided to make the game less realistic... After the first couple of minutes, and after you find the first artifact, a ghost will appear and send you to past. So, you'll have a chance to snoop around Louvre in four different epochs while it still used to be a residential palace. First, you'll travel to the mediaeval period of Charles V, then to renaissance period of Henri IV, and finally to 1789, the year of the French revolution. All of these periods, and the setting itself, provide great mystic atmosphere, and a perfect background for an adventure full of interesting puzzles.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed at first, as I did not expect this to be a Myst-like adventure. You can call me a blunt old Sierra/LucasArts-fan, but I still feel that engines like this somehow cannot give you a feeling of absolute freedom. On the other hand, this probably caused the game to be full of pre-rendered cut-scenes. And not only are there a lot of them; they had been done very well, especially the ones containing character animation...

This visual experience was provided by the 4X technologies Phoenix VR engine, which both controls the free-look mode and plays the desired animations. Even though it is a 2D engine, it will create a perfect illusion of the third dimension and work relatively quick even on older computers using pretty good compression code, which is the only way to explain how a game with this many animations fit on two disks only. The downside to all this is the noticeable pixelization, the maximum resolution of 640x480, and of course the fact that you cannot move about freely.

The puzzles are very interesting and well balances all through the game. The game will start with relatively simple puzzles, and increase in difficulty until the puzzles start resembling the ones from the 11th Hour or 7th Guest. The puzzles are alongside with the animations and the story, main trumps of this game. There are practically no dialogues in the game, as most living people you do meet on your quest will be hostile guards, and the interaction with other characters mostly comes down to giving them certain objects from your inventory.

This is where we come to the most irritating point in this game - the much used inventory. Ok, it's designed neatly, and it's easily accessible, but it will never let you carry more than eight objects (plus four artifacts) at once. Horrific!!! What if you happen to find more than eight things at a time? Well, then, you'll have to store your surplus burden in special suitcases. At least there are a lot of those... You'll find one in every third or fourth room you pass. Still, this makes the game extremely frustrating at times, as it will make you back and fourth from a location where you have to solve a puzzle to the location containing a suitcase. Now imagine if you had three times as more objects than you can carry in you wallet... I really have no idea why they did it this way... It sure wasn't for the sake of verisimilitude as you still can access one and the same trunk from dozens of places. And I guess it's not the same if you carry several small keys and letters or if you carry a table, a pile of books some logs, and a crossbow.

Oh, and add to that the monotonous music that appears every time you open the inventory, and you'll get something really aggravating. If I disregard the inventory tune, the rest of the music and sounds suit in-game atmosphere well-enough.

There, The Messenger is a game that you will surely find fun to play if you ever liked games like this, or if you ever liked the medieval age and Templar knights. Even if you didn't there's a nice opportunity for you to learn a lot on the subject, as the developers and their associates really took history for serious.