Messiah (2000)
Messiah is a 2000 shooter video game made by Shiny Entertainment and Interplay.
God has a problem: the future is a rotten place, and angels capable of handling it are in short supply. The solution is Bob, a cherub dispatched to a grimy cyberpunk dystopia with a single unusual gift: he can leap into the body of any human, animal, or engineered creature and take control. Sharpshooter, guard dog, industrial robot, it does not matter. Bob slips in, borrows whatever the host can do, and gets on with cleaning things up. The world is grim; the mechanic is gleefully strange.
Quick answers
What is Messiah about?
God has a problem: the future is a rotten place, and angels capable of handling it are in short supply. The solution is Bob, a cherub dispatched to a grimy cyberpunk dystopia with a single unusual gift: he can leap into the body of any human, animal, or engineered creature and take control. Sharpshooter, guard dog, industrial robot, it does not matter. Bob slips in, borrows whatever the host can do, and gets on with cleaning things up. The world is grim; the mechanic is gleefully strange.
When was Messiah released?
Messiah was released on 31 March 2000.
Who made Messiah?
Messiah was made by Shiny Entertainment and Interplay.
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Messiah in our writing
- Companion guide: Interplay: By Gamers, For Gamers, and the Golden Age of the RPG
A few thoughts on Messiah
The premise of a small divine operative sent to fix a broken world runs almost identically through God, the Devil and Bob, the animated series where God enlists an ordinary man named Bob to save humanity. Both play the absurdity straight enough to keep a real edge underneath.
An outsider pulling the strings from inside someone else's body
Messiah's whole premise turns on a cherub named Bob who leaps between bodies, human, animal, or machine, to fix a rotten future from the inside. These stories run on that same trick: a soul, spirit, or self riding around in someone else's skin, changing who is really in control without changing who they are.
Gods and outsiders stuck cleaning up humanity's mess
Bob gets sent to clean up Messiah's grim future because the beings actually in charge clearly aren't up to the job. These stories share that same setup: an outsider, alien, or reluctant god forced to fix a broken world from ground level, doing the dirty, unglamorous work that everyone in power keeps avoiding.
Cyberpunk futures where progress curdled into something ugly
The cyberpunk dystopia in Messiah is grimy on purpose, a future where technology solved nothing and just gave decay a sleeker coat of paint. These share that same rusted, neon-lit mood: cities that promised progress and delivered rot instead, where the tech is advanced but the world around it has clearly gone wrong.