The Messenger takes its player through centuries of history
and tradition in the Louvre, the august eight-century-old building
in Paris, once the host to heads of French state and now housing one
of the greatest art collections on earth. One of the highlights of
this game is that the player explores the building in different time
periods, getting to enjoy the feel of how it has been used historically,
how the architecture has changed and been added to, and how people
of these times looked and interacted with the environment. From this
viewpoint, playing The Messenger is a rich historical experience
as well as a game.

This is an aspect in which this game truly shines. The building itself
has been carefully reconstructed using plans and historical documents,
and the attention to detail shows. This unto itself makes it fun to
explore the Louvre, and it reminds me of some other games that have
lovingly recreated historical sites, such as Titanic and The
Legend of Lotus Spring.

The story of The Messenger is actually quite minimal. You
play as Secret Service Agent Morgan Sinclair, ordered to infiltrate
the Louvre and recover four artifacts known as “Satan’s Keys”
in five time periods. These keys, when brought together and joined,
will bring about Armageddon. It is the dying wish of Morgan’s father
that she halt this.

The graphics are well-done. Environments are richly detailed, well-designed,
and completely appropriate for each time period the game moves through.
Some of the rooms seemed rather empty, however, with only one or two
pieces of furniture and the walls to explore. This may or may not
be an accurate representation of how the Louvre has been maintained
over the years, but it definitely lessened what there was to explore.
There are really nice transitional animations that give the game a
further lush look.

Characters are cleverly designed, and they really keep the whole
look and feel of each time period fresh and very realistic.

Now to some of the more problematic aspects of this title. The game
is designed in such a way that saving becomes like a compulsory itch–the
player can accidentally surprise guards and die, and there is absolutely
no way to anticipate when this is going to happen. Yuck.

Another weakness with the design is that the inventory system is
just way too complex and not at all intuitive. There’s just a lot
of “figuring out” to do. For some explicable reason, the
inventory was designed to only hold a limited number of items, and
the others that are given to the character at the opening or found
during gameplay are stored in a chest. The chest appears in various
rooms throughout the gameplay, and all items can be stored in any
chest anywhere to be accessed from any chest anywhere–highly unrealistic.
There is a mapping system that will take the player to any area already
explored during gameplay, normally a wonderful thing, but because
of the onerous task of loading and unloading and rearranging inventory,
even this task becomes practically as arduous as having to walk back
and forth from locations to the closest trunks. Traitor’s Gate,
which this game most resembles, does the big inventory system
of tools mixed with things found much more smoothly.

All of the puzzles are inventory-based, and so this necessitates
a lot of this “inventory shuffle,” especially since you
are given tools to get in and around and through things, such as a
flashlight and knife and gas mask. But you also have a whole separate
set of items that must be combined and used in each time period to
solve puzzles that have to do specifically with that portion of the
game.

The endgame sequence is pretty short and sweet. This is not really
surprising, as the character you have been playing is minimally defined
and spends the majority of the game acting as a Sigourney Weaver/Lara
Croft superhero, rather than an in-depth character study. However,
the extreme brevity of the endgame may be surprising and disappointing
to some.

The soundtrack accompanies the environment nicely. It runs in short
loops but does not get overly redundant. The soundtrack does not play
throughout the game; instead, there are periods where the player enjoys
the ambient sounds of the environment of the Louvre and the people
in the structure.

At one point about three-quarters of the way through the game, it
dumped me out inexplicably, which of course heightened the compulsive
save twitch just that much more. This did happen only once. Other
than that, there were no bugs or problems–it installed smoothly and
ran without a hitch.

The Messenger is not a bad game, it’s just that there are
design elements that make sections of gameplay laborious rather than
fun. And with that in mind, there are quite a few more recent releases
worth the time spent, such as Dracula Resurrection, from the
same developer and publisher, as well as games that are similar in
nature that have some elements most frustrating here worked out better,
such as Traitor’s Gate.

Final Grade: C+

System Requirements (Macintosh):
G3 or iMac
System 8.5.1
32 MB RAM (64 MB RAM from Virtual Memory)
(64 MB RAM recommended)
6 MB 3D video card, Open GL compatible
8X CD-ROM drive