The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (PS4) Review.
Release Date: 11 October 2018
Date Played: 5 November 2021
"The Missing" is another game by legendary auteur game developer SWERY. Much like his cult classic game, Deadly Premonition, SWERY incorporates a surrealist tone full of disjointed game design, dialog, locales, scenery, storyline, and emotion into this game. It gives a very reminiscent feeling to the TV show Twin Peaks. If you're a fan of that sort of world creation, you're much more likely to enjoy his games. If not, you might find them a garbled mess that drive you away immediately. This game in particular has some difficult subject matter that will already drive some people away; and just the fact that this game was made at all is an accomplishment. Personally, I love the way SWERY makes games... and while I didn't find The Missing to be his best game, it certainly tackles the game's difficult and important subject matter in an empathetic manner that I haven't seen any other developers give even the most cursory attempt. This game tells a story that needs to be told, but does it make it a fun and enjoyable experience along the way?
You play as J.J. Macfield, a 19 year old college student who is on a camping trip with her girlfriend, Emily. The game begins with a sweet and touching scene around a night-time campfire as the two women open their hearts to each other and confess their love. The framing of the scene is very pretty, but the dialog is stilted and awkwardly timed as if the two voice actresses weren't in the same room at the time of the recording. This, of course, is a hallmark of SWERY games and you really can't fault him for it. It gives the game a very dreamlike feel that places a slightly disturbing undertone into the whole scene. It makes you feel uneasy and foreshadows the horrors to come. The next morning, you find Emily is missing and you have to set out across the beautiful Maine countryside to find her.
The game is a 2.5D side scrolling puzzle platformer that is very much in the vain of Limbo and Inside (developed by Playdead). The scenery and character models are rendered in 3D but placed into a two-dimensional plane where you can only move left and right. You travel through different areas such as forests, cathedrals, factories, diners, and more while collecting doughnuts (the game's collectibles) and solving puzzles in order to continue. These puzzles aren't too challenging and seem pretty derivative of what we've seen again and again in games of this style. It's an odd choice of a device to tell this story and I feel like the game's subject matter could have been served better had SWERY chosen a different genre. The puzzles aren't really anything special and feel more tedious to complete rather than granting that sense of, "Eureka!" when you finally figure out the solution.
The game does have some gorgeous visuals at times even in they aren't quite up to par for a current gen gaming system. This is nothing new for SWERY who always seems to make his games look like they are a generation removed from the current one. There's nothing like a 3D rendered game with live footage of grainy filmed stormclouds imposed into the sky with retro-inspired parallax scrolling. So campy... so cool. It's very strange and suits the game perfectly. There are some good uses of color to set the tone of the game as well as some interesting items in the background to add some live to the isolated world. To help with the aesthetics, a quite good soundtrack is implemented. It mainly consists of somber piano music that induces a well placed sense of melancholy in the gamer. At other times, it will present you with an upbeat vocalized pop song that can seem jarringly out of place. The opening credits are a prime example of this where you get to hear J.J. sobbing unconsolably while a happy upbeat song plays an the game's title card fades into the screen. Quite disturbing. In addition to this, the recorded dialog to the game is usually worded very peculiarly and garbled to give a sense of uneasiness. The sound design of this is actually really good and is a memorable component of the journey.
It's difficult to describe what this game is all about without giving away too much of what you discover on the journey. The main "hook" of the game is that J.J. is almost incapable of dying. As you're solving puzzles you will encounter many hazards such as lightning, saw blades, fire, wrecking balls, and more. If you come into contact with these, J.J. will break her neck, have limbs dismembered, become electrocuted, and burned. It's all quite macabre and the screams and obvious pain she is going through is quite honestly appalling. Limbo and Inside had some pretty gruesome deaths, but at least when they happened the game sent you back to a checkpoint. This isn't the case here. J.J. will have to use her severed limbs, burning body, decapitated head, etc. to solve the puzzles. Sometimes, you'll have to throw your bleeding stump of an arm up into a tree to knock something loose. Or, set yourself on fire and shriek while running across the screen to burn some vines that are blocking your path. It's a gross mechanic that I'm honestly not a huge fan of. However, it does actually serve an important part in telling the game's story. So, while I'm pretty off put by the suffering of our protagonist, I understand why SWERY decided to do it.
Another huge component of the game is reading text messages from your mother, professor, college friends,... and plushie. These text messages are expertly written and seem like they were stolen off of a current college student's phone. The usage of memes, poor grammar, awkward dialog, cringe worthy moments, and ghosted replies hits home really hard and is too painfully accurate. It's too real and it contrasts against the dreamlike and surrealist setting of the game in a way that is jarring to say the least. I understand that it needs to be done this way to make the story real... but, geez, is it emotionally draining to read. As you go through all of these texts, you'll get more insight into J.J.'s relationships with her friends, her home and school life, her general outlook, and the goings on around campus. You'll even be given a look into the lives of her friends and how they view J.J. themselves. It's a very intimate mechanic of the game and really draws you into J.J.'s thoughts and emotions. It's not a pleasant place to be. You'll also get the frequent text from your stuffed plushie, F.K.. He's a meme machine and writes like he came off of the 4Chan message boards. I guess he's supposed to be J.J.'s guiding light... but he seems like more of an internet troll most of the time.
As for the gameplay, I'm not a huge fan of puzzle platformers. I love side-scrolling platforming in games... and I love solving the occasional puzzle in a game and even puzzle games themselves. But for some reason, I don't really like to combine the genres. This is just my opinion, and I know everyone doesn't feel the same way I do. I loved Limbo and Inside just like everyone else in the gaming community seemed to. So I thought I would feel the same way about this game. Unfortunately, that wasn't really the case this time around. I think the story, world building, and emotion of the game are all great just like Limbo and Inside. But in contrast to those specific games, the gameplay of The Missing was not fun. The controls are terrible and an absolute chore to deal with. J.J. is extremely floaty and slow to react. She'll often trip and fall and it takes too long for her to get up. When you become dismembered or burned, you can hold a button to heal yourself, but this takes like 5 seconds and you'll often have to do it dozens of times to solve a puzzle and it really grinds down your nerves. There are too many frames of animation when you turn around, kneel, crawl, and stand up. It's adds a delay into controlling the character and makes that game so clunky... which once again is a huge SWERY hallmark. Side scrollers are supposed to be primarily focused on the gameplay with tight controls and intuitive gameplay. It makes the wooden nature of the this game more blatantly obvious that his other games. There are also these long puzzle sequences where you have to traverse some large area by solving multiple mini-puzzles in a row. If you somehow completely die (which will happen), you have to repeat the whole section again. This is totally unreasonable and feels like it wastes your time. Yes, you can solve the puzzles more quickly because you already figured them out... but J.J.'s annoyingly slow and awkward movement just pours salt into the wound of dying in the first place. There are some segments where you get to play as J.J.'s decapitated head and it reminds me a lot of Super Meat Boy with tight platforming and fluid controls. There are tight spots where you have to jump over a series of spinning saw blades and maneuver around tight corners. These few sections were the most fun I had while playing the game and I wish there had been a lot more of them. The game gets very repetitive after a while and I feel like it never really expands as much on the mechanics of the puzzles as much as it had the potential to.
Even with the poor game control, sad story, uncomfortable subject matter, repetitive gameplay, and disturbing content, The Missing is still a trip worth taking. The game and its puzzles aren't really enjoyable and get old pretty quickly. A lot of the time spent in this game is emotionally draining and can frequently be a painful experience... but, I guess that's what SWERY was going for.
Much like SWERY's magnum opus, Deadly Premonition, this game is a train wreck of gameplay, mechanics, performance, and design. In that game, the amazing characters, setting, attitude, and story were so outstanding that it overcame all other negatives to create a masterpiece. Unfortunately, The Missing's strong components aren't enough to override its shortcomings.
Final Status: Beaten (and almost 100% completed. Only missing a few collectibles and texts)
Final Score: 6/10 (And emotionally painful and important game... but not fun to play)
Now if you're interested to know more, let me tell you why I think this is an important game but stumbles in its execution.
WARNING***
SPOILERS AHEAD***
As you play the game, you discover that J.J. is actually transgendered and the whole experience is allegory for body dysmorphia. J.J.'s body can be destroyed and hacked apart without killing her because she doesn't even really feel like it's her body to begin with. You also learn that the entire game is a hallucination that is happening while J.J. is dying after attempting suicide by slitting her wrists in front of her college classmates due to depression and recent rumors being leaked to her family and classmates of her transgendered nature. At this point, J.J. isn't sure who she is inside and it takes this death hallucination for J.J. to realize she's transgendered and actually a female. Up to this point you get the feeling that J.J. has really only dipped her toe into transitioning and doesn't really have a good sense of self yet. Once the game is over, and J.J. is saved by the paramedics in the real world you can feel the joy and newly lifted burden as she feels reborn in a world that was previously foreign and scary to her. She gets to face her friends and family as her true self finally.
So, that's the important part of the story. Like I said, I haven't seen this idea tackled in any video game prior to this. Personally, I think it's groundbreaking and an important step in helping the gaming culture move to a more accepting and tolerant mindset. I'm glad SWERY decided to make this game and take on such a polarizing subject. I'm also glad I played it.
Now, for the real problem with this game (other than the fact that the platforming and puzzles just aren't fun to me)......
J.J. isn't a likeable character. I get that she's going through A LOT and is suffering both physically, emotionally, and physically. But, if you want your audience to bond and become emotionally attached to your protagonist, they have to care and be invested in that character. It's difficult for a general audience to feel empathy for a transgendered character... because most of us aren't transgendered and couldn't never actually know what it feels like to go through those sort of struggles. So, SWERY has taken on a very, very difficult task just by breaching the subject of this game. It would have gone far to make J.J. a more likeable character regardless of gender in order to make the gamer drawn to her based on her personality and not just her struggles.
My comment about J.J.'s personality stem from those text messages that I mentioned earlier. Quite often J.J.'s friends will send her a really friendly and sincere message and J.J. will just blow them off, or sarcastically reply, shut down the conversation, or just ghost them. If you've ever been in an argument with a significant other over text, you know exactly what I'm talking about. One side will send paragraphs of heart-felt texts to the other person only to have snarky one word replies like, "...ok" and "whatever..." sent their way. It's very, very anxiety inducing and J.J. is pretty much like this all of the time. She's either dismissive of her caring friends, outwardly aggressive towards people that want to help, and generally pretty moody all of the time. It's obvious that J.J. cares for these people, but you would never know it from reading the communications she has with the people in her life. I feel like after every single reply she makes, the other party is going to answer back with, "is something wrong?" It's exhausting and really pushes the game back from reaching its goal in my opinion. I know it's superficial of me to let something as banal as these text messages ruin my enjoyment of the game, but they are huge focus of the storytelling in this game that it's impossible to ignore. J.J. seems like she is ready to fly off the cuff and start and argument, passive aggressively taunt you, insult you, or throw your feelings into the wind at the slightest inclination of any sort of outward emotion being shown. By the end of the game the only things I'm sure that J.J. cares about are Emily, doughnuts, and privacy.
I would give the gameplay and enjoyment experience of this game like a 3/10 and the importance of the subject matter a 10/10. So, the game averages out to about a 6/10... which is so very disappointing. I feel like if just a little more thought and care had been given to some of the weaker aspects of the game, it could have reached a larger audience and maybe helped out some more people.
