Be careful with "a message style system", it probably depends on implementation, but usually you would loose static type checking, and can then make some errors very difficult to debug. Note that calling object's methods it is already a message-like system.
Probably you are simply missing some levels of abstraction, for example for navigation a Player could use a Navigator instead of knowing all about the Map itself. You also say that this has usually descended into setting lots of pointers, what are those pointers? Probably, you are giving them to a wrong abstraction?.. Making objects know about others directly, without going through interfaces and intermediates, is a straight way to getting a tightly coupled design.
