The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

I don't think I've ever cried so much playing a game as I did with this one. The adventure and gameplay are visually brutal, the puzzles are interesting and creative. The cell phone dialogue with the other characters feels real.And all these elements help on making up a beautiful story. The narrative is presented in a very interesting way and it's message always gets to me. This is my first SWERY game and it won't be my last.

“This game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are.” The Missing is difficult to judge. On one hand, it’s an extremely audacious game that weaves its mechanics with its story, one that it tells without a hint of hesitation. On the other hand, its gameplay is slow, janky, and frustrating. I DO believe that it deserves accolades for dealing with tough subject matters earnestly and with sincerity, but I’d be lying if I said that I enjoyed actually playing it. The Missing is primarily a sidescrolling puzzle platformer where you play as the titular J.J. Macfield. She has the ability to maim herself using the environment and then regenerate. If this concept sounds macabre, that’s because it absolutely is and the game doesn’t try to pretend that it isn’t. You’ll see J.J.’s limbs fly everywhere, her bones break, and her body burn up, all accompanied with horrifying screams. Naturally (or not), you’ll use this ability to solve puzzles on your journey. I think the game’s largest setback is the game feel. The Missing has a lot of animation priority (a la Prince of Persia or Limbo) but the animations are too long - the act of just crouching or standing up takes a long time. This design philosophy applies to everything in the game: damaging yourself, regenerating, jumping, using switches, picking up items… all of it. This includes when you die and have to restart, where you’re infuriatingly thrown back 10 minutes because of poor checkpointing. Add in some baffling decisions, like being locked in a certain direction when you’re trying to throw something, makes for a game that does not feel responsive at all. As a result, the actual puzzle solving just isn’t fun. The plot of The Missing is pretty simple: it begins when J.J. and her best friend Emily arrive at an island for a camping trip. Emily quickly goes missing and J.J. sets out to find her. The unique thing about the story is almost all of it is told in text messages that J.J. had received in the past. These conversations, for the most part, feel real and organic, and they color in her personality. I don’t want to spoil anything but the subject matters that the game deals with are ones that you don’t see often in the industry, and it tackles them with honesty and compassion.

Putting the Inside in Inside Mari, the Limbs in Limbo, the- best I leave Cocoon unsaid. There's two entirely different games here operating at two separate levels of quality and focus. There's also a few points where the game likes to be silly by reminding us of Super Meat Boy's unfortunate legacy. The game side takes the motifs of Lynch, but sends Lynch back to the trenches by telling on itself (while not being that opaque in the first place). It's a bog-standard Odyssey of the self conducted through snapped necks and self-immolation. It's island is too standard to be as surreal or psychological as it really ought to be, though I get hiding your hand. Very passable, but ultimately felt like a vessel for the real game of Donut collection. The Missing puts the Secret in Secret Little H- sorry, sorry. The optional texts from your mother and five confidants that unfurl through getting enough data from your phone to see how you got here bring so many dilemmas and believability to the table. I... really like these characters. Archetypal or not, I've known these characters. I've been JJ against Lilys, admired people like Abby, endeared myself similarly for my professor's to show their nerdy side. I've also cut myself off from Lilys, Abbys and Professors scared of what my face looked like in their head. [spoilers from here on] They're all good friends, people I could see myself falling in with, pleasing and endearing to listen to, but they're also incredibly transactional or objectifying. We're Abby's vent, Phillip's pedestal, Lily's lust... and in the stress of having your social identity on the line, especially in a telegraphed hostile environment towards queer people, it's so easy to use those things as reasons to run, to disappear in the woods amidst the Estrogen Elves and Spiro Serpents until they can't recognize you anymore, until your bond is rotted drippage. Professor Goodman is an exception, but there's no person more ephemeral in their significance than a teacher, no person more capable of throwing us to the flames of Mother. Mother made me tremble, my arm shaking over the arrow keys as I clicked through her discovery. Trauma recalled, I guess, because I've been in this exact position... was forced to come out prematurely to not be seen as disgusting in my own home. Lucky me my parents are liberals, I guess... I don't think I would have survived voices outside my own head telling me I was wrong, disgusting, one of God's mistakes, cus I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ know you internalize all that ♥♥♥♥. Emily is the beacon through that, yet the ultimate premise is that she is parroting your own words, your own actions, sympathetically signalling to you your own self-destruction. It's always you, gouging your eyes out, succumbing to the spectres of utter condemnation. There's always someone left, willing to chop themselves to bits to even loosen your chains. Love speaks louder than the judgement crucibles of unknown eyes, the cacophany of self-termination. I... don't think JJ is good trans rep, but the capacity to delve into such transient shared experiences, to be thrown into the lens of utter distrust, uncertainty and hostility one perceives the world through for daring to read Butler and deny Freud is pinpoint accurate. I shook, I cried, I laughed, I longed. Maybe I should reach out to my Lilys and Abbys again, erase the scars of my dead face from the world. Still, fear of Mother grasps me, fear of my nihilistic, loveless past. Reparations for DP2 or not, this gives me hope that we can dismantle the utter fear and stigma of being your best self.

It's not a good game from a technical standpoint, but it's a good story/art piece. I'd rate it 6/10 but would still recommend it.

Sincere and earnest to a fault, this is the kind of game you'd apply the phrase "it's got a lot of heart" to, in both positive and negative senses. The story is well-worth experiencing, and blends well with the thematic elements of the gameplay, but holy cow, they should've let you use the "cheat" acquired by finishing the game to make J.J. faster from the get-go.

Faraway from being perfect, but that's precisely why it's a special one.

chef d'oeuvre vive swery

One of the most disturbing platformers I had ever played. Interesting concept. However I would not recommend this game to anyone. The concept of self-mutilation to solve puzzles is quite...shocking.

This game makes a bad first impression. After realizing you can't remap the controls and the games glyphs for a controller don't change based on what you have plugged in, you're greeted with rough voice acting and an in game menu that is so broken you can't even use it without your mouse. Your cursor doesn't go away either. You have to drag it to the edge of the screen if you don't want it on top of your game. But if you can get past this strong attempt to turn you away, you'll soon come to realize that the game's actually really fun. The central mechanic of hurting or dismembering yourself in some way to solve the puzzles is used in various creative ways. It's grotesque and absurd and that's why it works. When you start having thoughts like "I could break my neck to shift gravity, then cut of my arm and throw it between the gears before setting myself on fire to open the gate" you know the game is successfully making a point to you. It's a classic high concept, horror adjacent 2.5D puzzler à la Limbo, Darq or Little Nightmares, in gameplay and in storytelling. Much of what makes this story so resonant comes from the metaphorical world. Everything is something else, symbolism is everywhere, meaning comes before reason. Very much in the spirit of the games that insipired it, the world of THE MISSING is constructed out of pieces of the real world, rearranged into something surreal, liminal and defamiliarised. This is where the storytelling shines the most. It's weird and it leans into that to be thought provoking. When you come across a place or a new object, you immediately question what it means to JJ. I'm vocal in my criticism of stories that throw metaphors and symbols at you without giving you a baseline for the character they're attached to. THE MISSING is not one of those stories. Through the text messages you unlock over time, you gain a basic understanding of who JJ is as a person. The experience of the game is where the rest is hidden. The secrets, the things that were only whispered between Emily and JJ. Piecing it together is a wonderful and emotional experience. What then bugs me is that the game sometimes doesn't trust you to figure these things out. To come to your own conclusion. Imagine you have been chased by a grotesque, four armed Monster throughout the game. It has earned its symbolic weight and meaning to you. And when the game enters its finale, JJ all but turns to the camers and tells you what it means. Suddenly, the meandering, personal note collapses into a singular vision. It's not special to you anymore. What was the point of thinking about it? The game doesn't do this too often because thankfully JJ doesn't talk all that much throughout the game. But when she does, she likes to tell you the meaning of things that were much more powerful unexplained. The mono- and dialogue is really the major weakpoint of the experience. It's shallow, direct and not very well acted. JJ's voice actress is great when doing pain sounds, but the actual spoken lines would actually have been more effective if they were simply written on screen, leaving the intonation up to imagination. The writing is better in the text messages. Those are clunky at times, but often they read believable to pretty subtext rich and even emotionally impacting. Thumbs up on that part. THE MISSING is a very personal experience. I love a protagonist that I can't relate too all that much, but whom I still understand and feel for. That is, in my opinion, a high achievement in the art of character writing. JJ is unlike most people. And for such a story to successfully create an experience that feels resonant and close, despite never, having lived comparable circumstances is a feat I applaud. A masterstroke in that aspect lies in a brutal, kind of soul-crushing moment at the very end. It gave me an understanding of an experience I have never felt in my life. I don't want to get too into it. You'll know it when it hits you. Overall, THE MISSING is quite rough around the edges, to the point that it occasionally sabotages itself. But the very core, the experience, told through gameplay, visual and atmosphere, is strong, resonant and unique. It's smarter than it gives itself credit for. On top of that the game is just fun and there's even some stuff to grind and secrets to uncover for the completionists like me. Another win for Limbo's legacy!

This is an outstanding game, though not perfect. On the technical side of things it lacks a lot of grace - the gameplay is innovative and fun conceptually, but as far as the execution goes it could use a lot of refining. Movement can get odd, sometimes (most of the time) interacting with stuff is janky and, especially towards the endgame, while remaining simple some of the puzzles get a bit convoluted in a frustrating way. Despite all that this game is perhaps one of the best explorations of its themes at least among the medium, maybe in general. It is gruesome and forthright while presenting the player with a description of the circumstance rather than a particular interpretation - in so doing a well-defined framework is built so as to facilitate the message and also allow for the thoughts of the players to build upon it. It is not an extremely high-brow piece of literature, but it has things to say and at least to me they seem a useful aspect to ponder. Not everyone may be able to directly relate to the characters' experiences, but the authentic representation opens way for empathy and makes the experience worthwhile if only to better understand people/life in general. It is a relatively short experience, so the gameplay being somewhat underdone is not a large hurdle, and with the story being rather thoughtful I can only recommend this game.