Just finished The Messenger (2018). This is another Ninja Gaiden inspired retro platformer, similar to Shovel Knight. You have your jump and your sword slash with shitty range. Unlike Shovel Knight though, it's actually fun to play.
The "unique" draw of this game is the cloudstep: if you slash something in midair, you gain a midair jump. This can be chained infinitely, as long as you have targets to slash—and there are plenty. This is a really fun mechanic to work with (although it isn't actually that unique—look at Ori's Bash or Shio's... thing) when it is utilized, but honestly it doesn't come into play particularly often. The game doesn't feel built around it. What the game is built around is generally solid platforming and combat that addresses many of the long-standing issues with the genre in creative ways. Two examples immediately come to mind.
- We all know the feeling of getting hit in one of these jump-and-slash games and taking the knockback arc directly into a pit. Messenger doesn't remove the classic knockback animation, but it gives your character the ability to jump out of it.
- Nothing ruins the pace of a fun action platformer like enemies that take forever to kill and block your path. Most enemies in The Messenger have one HP, and all of them are weak across their entire body. If you can avoid their attacks, you don't have to slow down at all to mow through them.
I died fairly regularly (the game has a death counter, and I was somewhere in the 300s at the end), and there are checkpoints only every 2ish minutes. But design decisions like these and others make it not a problem. After every death you run back to where you were faster and faster, and it feels very rewarding, because the only real limit to how fast you can go is your own skill. I can see how this game would be very fun to speedrun.
That's not to say the gameplay doesn't have its niggles. There are a few times throughout where local cycles force you to wait. I hate the fucking Jumping Quillshrooms. There are about ten unique enemies (not counting bosses) so if enemy variety keeps you going, you might not be thrilled—they're mostly there to enhance the platforming challenges. Most of the bosses, including the two final ones the game has been building up to, are too easy, though they are at least fun to fight. And the game's second act makes you run through most of the levels again, which kind of wears thin, though it at least has a ton of new content mixed in. All of these niggles don't detract from the main thesis here though: the gameplay is generally good.
As for the ancillaries, they're nothing extraordinary, but I was generally impressed by them as well. The story is less clever than it thinks it is, but there are still some extremely cool setpieces and moments, and the writing is enjoyable and absolutely packed to the brim with actually funny jokes. I found myself reading all of the optional dialogues. The art is good, while the music is only okay (some themes get kind of grating after a while honestly). But in the second act, you can swap between 8-bit and 16-bit art and music, which is exactly as cool as it sounds, i.e. very. It's not a sprawling epic like Hollow Knight, but there's probably 15-25 hours of content depending on how fast you play, with a good amount of variety.
So that's my take on The Messenger. It's hardly the cornerstone of the genre, but I definitely recommend it to any fan of action platformers. If you liked Shovel Knight and your taste isn't bollocks, you'll like this more.