The Messenger devs talk moving beyond Ninja Gaiden, and the 8-bit/16-bit swapping mechanic

The Messenger is one of my most anticipated games. I cannot wait to play it, and fell in love with the game since the debut trailer. Now that it's coming to the Switch, my excitement has increased ten-fold. I've been looking for an experience akin to classic Ninja Gaiden, and The Messenger is definitely looking like it'll deliver on that.

The thing is, the dev team isn't just trying to recreate Ninja Gaiden. In an interview with GamesBeat, Sabotage cofounder Martin Brouard talked about how the company is certainly inspired by Ninja Gaiden, but it seeing out to create something of their own as well.

“Ninja Gaiden is obviously one of the inspirations. That’s what we want the player to think at the start. But it has a lot of inspiration from other games of the retro era, both in 8-bit and 16-bit. The creative director has been collecting these games and playing them since he was young. He’s wanted to make this game since he was eight years old. It’s been evolving in his mind for many years.”

That 8-bit/16-bit swapping is a pretty interesting mechanic, and it didn't happen by accident. The option is meant to be an attention-getter, and it seems to be working.

“There’s something like 7,000 games that came out on Steam in 2017. We have to find ways to get people’s attention. One of those ways to reveal the fact that we switch from 8-bit to 16-bit. At first we wanted to keep that secret. But then, maybe, we’d have had a tenth of the attention we’ve gotten since we revealed the game. It was a difficult decision, but having shared that has been beneficial."