The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (

2018

)

When a game starts off with a blank screen that reads: “This game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are” I get a little nervous. Not because there is anything objectionable about that statement, quite the opposite in fact. It's such a nebulous and positive statement that it makes me wonder for what reason anyone would bother stating it at all. It's practically the equivalent to the old “I'm not racist but...” in the amount of dread it conjures up. I understand that artists may feel the need to virtue signal in their work periodically, especially in this day where the social justice inquisition is on a constant prowl for any wrong-thinkers, but doing so right out of the gate as today's game does raises some concerns. Does the developer really think such a banal phrase is a grand revelation that will shock their viewers? Or worse still, are the game makers akin to those male feminists that scream “don't rape women” precisely because they like to spend their free time raping women and have projected their own warped psyche onto the rest of the world? Fortunately, this does not seem to be the case for the lead developer Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro, because as near as I can tell he is an utterly naive individual and all he wants is for the people of the world to set aside their differences and sing kumbayas together. It's a sickeningly sweet mentality, sure, but at least it's not a disguise for something truly grotesque.

This is an artsy game, so the story is going to be a bit obscure, at least at the start anyway, The Missing is pretty good at drip feeding you it's plot and themes so even the dummies like me can figure out what's going on (unlike say Dark Souls [2011] or Braid [2008] where I needed to watch a fan analysis to tell what the hell was going on). We begin with two girls, the titular JJ Macfield and her friend Emily (who for reasons unknown to me, wears a carnival barker's hat). The girls are on a camping trip on the island of Memoria, off the coast of Maine. The relationship between the pair is left a bit ambiguous, and I was unsure whether they were supposed to be lovers or if they were just an example of the overly affectionate female friends trope that pops up with some regularity in Japanese fiction. This won't be cleared up anytime soon, because at the start of the game Emily goes missing and in true Mario fashion, JJ heads out to rescue her, not knowing where she'll find her friend but knowing instinctively that it is somewhere to the right. JJ doesn't get very far though before she's struck by lightning and then regenerated back to perfect health by a lab coat wearing moose while a poppy love song plays in the background, drowning out her sobs of pain. Obviously, things have gotten a bit weird.

The exact nature of just what is going on will mostly be slowly revealed through texts that your character gets throughout the game, first from your stuffed animal (who was vaporized in the lightning strike) and then through messages from your mom and Emily that were sent sometime before the fateful camping trip. You can also unlock messages from JJ's classmates at college by picking up collectible donuts scattered throughout the world but these conversations are, as far as I can tell, totally pointless. I didn't collect all the donuts but I gathered enough (about 200 out of 270) that if there was gonna be some plot-critical reveal through the text messages then I should have seen it. You have conversations with a punk rock girl named Abby, a rich-kid show-off named Phillip, a girl named Lily that likes cats and obviously has a crush on you, and your Industrial Design professor. None of them are present in the game in any form other than text messages, and none of them are particularly interesting (though the professor's obsessive love for Star Wars is worth a laugh).

The game itself takes the form of a puzzle platformer along the lines of Limbo [2010] or Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey [1997], with the main gimmick being to use J.J.'s regenerative powers to traverse the levels. Need to burn down a wooden barricade? Just set yourself on fire and use your nubile body to carry the flame wherever you need it. It leads to some perverse situations where I was genuinely upset that something doused my burning character with water. In other areas, some paths are too small for JJ's whole body to make it through, so you have to take enough damage that you're reduced to a head and can comically roll along the floor. This all makes sense, though I suspect that the fire could more easily be carried with a torch than with your character's hair, but hey, what do I know? The only injury used to traverse areas that's completely absurd is the one where your back is broken which inverts the world making the floor the ceiling and vice versa (al la VVVVVV [2010]). Obviously, that's not how spinal injuries work, but gravity inversion is a popular mechanic for puzzle platformers and its inclusion here does add another layer of depth and complexity to the puzzles. I only wish that the developers had tied it more closely to the central theme because as it stands it feels tacked on.

While the regenerative powers of the protagonist make for an original concept, they also prevented me from empathizing much with poor JJ. Maybe it's just a psychological defense mechanism on my part, but I stop feeling bad for the character I'm required to continuously maim in order to progress through the game sometime after the third spine mangling. Indeed, as the game goes on the obstacles that would normally inspire me with dread (swinging pendulums, spikes, and buzz-saws) were having the opposite effect on me. In most cases, I was downright pleased to see them because such dangers were the only way of traversing the level. Along the same lines, the overlong sequence where JJ mangle and unmangles her spine was horrific the first few times I saw it but constant repetition made it first boring and then downright annoying after a while. In time, it came to affect my feelings for the character as well, I just couldn't feel much sympathy for a person who instantly recovered from every injury, and cheerfully maimed herself in order to snag a few more donuts collectibles. A lot of reviewers confessed to feeling emotionally touched by the game, which is just baffling to me. The core gameplay gets in the way of the central story, engaging as that may be, and in my case completely snapped my sense of immersion.

This is a pretty serious complaint, as the actual puzzle elements of this puzzle game are on the weaker side, and are practically begging for a strong story to tie themselves on to. As evidenced by my play-time, it did not take me very long to finish The Missing, and that was because most of the puzzles were pretty simple to solve. Set yourself on fire, then avoid any water sources until you get to the door you need to burn down; invert gravity with a spinal injury then move a box over a few screens before switching back; make sure to land on the saw-blade that will cut off your legs but send you flying; that sort of thing. Only one part had me well and truly stumped, and that was in the bowling alley where you are required to arrange three cardboard cutouts and one giant novelty shoe in a certain order in order to proceed. If there was a hint that points you in the right direction then I must have missed it, because the only way I was able to get past this was a brute-force approach of trying every combination until it unlocked.

Lame puzzles aren't the end of The Missing's only problems though, it also struggles with the platformer part of the puzzle-platformer equation. Jumping just feels floaty and imprecise, and at times when the game requires split-second reactions, where the margin for error is that of a cat's whisker, it becomes downright obnoxious. To be fair, JJ is probably the least athletic character I've ever played in a video game, and her every animation makes that plain with every action she undertakes. It's rare that I say I'd be better off playing an accurate recreation of myself instead of the player character in a video game, but this one of the times. The game also has a problem with checkpoints, which thanks to JJ's regenerative powers only occasionally becomes an issue. Still, every so often you will run into an obstacle that can kill you outright, and when that happens its a crapshoot whether the last checkpoint will set you back at a reasonable spot or knock you back to before a set of tedious obstacle you already cleared. A particularly bad example of this happened to me in the clock tower when I hit a saw blade from the wrong angle and died instantly. The game then knocked me back to the start of the previous puzzle. To make matters worse, at this point Emily is talking to you in a heavily modified voice that is annoying the first time you hear it and infuriating on the second or third run-through. I was stuck replaying this section on repeat a couple of times, and I confess if I had not made up my mind to review this game I would have probably given up there and then.

The game's premise is obviously going for magical realism, but unfortunately, this is not reflected much in the environments of the game. Instead of a strange surreal landscape, we're given a series of abandoned buildings that aside from a couple of memorable highlights quickly blend together into an amorphous gray blur. The absurd and magical parts (like the gigantic toy monkeys that crush your spine with their symbols) don't mesh well with the world and instead feel like they were tacked on as an afterthought. There's only a single moment in the game, near the end, where things go completely mad and we see 100 years pass in an instant and whales swimming through the sky. I'll confess to finding this bit striking and beautiful but it was over almost as soon as it began and the player is pushed back into the mundane world of the rest of the game. More of this would have been a welcome addition to The Missing, and given the context of the story which I'll address below fitted better with the world of the game. To be fair though, the skies in their game are incredibly (almost distractingly) beautiful. They look like the developers used real footage of the heavens and then cleverly inserted them into their game. A lot of work plainly went into them, and it's a shame that the same level of polish wasn't applied evenly throughout.

Despite these numerous flaws, the story of The Missing manages to be fairly compelling (when it's not being spoiled by the janky game-play or obscured by the bland environments). However, there's no way to discuss it in any depth without spoiling, so consider this your last warning. Via text messages we get a few hints about JJ's identity, and those who are paying attention will probably pick up on the fact that she is transgender well in advance of the final reveal (I figured it out when JJ was so concerned about her mom finding woman's clothes in her room, and if I missed that I'm sure I would have gotten it when JJ confesses to being distressed by a website calling her a “Princess Packing Extra”). This aspect of the story is handled unusually well, as we in the audience are allowed to organically put the pieces together as we get to know the character. It's much better than the approach used by Bioware and other developers, who are so worried that audiences will miss the fact that their character is transgender that they have them blurt it out within moments of meeting the player character. At the end of the game, it's revealed that JJ was worn down by the stresses of her life until she tried to commit suicide by leaping from the roof of the school's gymnasium. The whole game takes place inside her dying mind, the moose in the lab-coat is a combination of the paramedic trying to save her and the school mascot that was the last thing she saw before losing consciousness. Cleverly, JJ in the real world looks physically much more masculine, but the one in her own mind is completely feminine because that is how gender dysphoria works. In such context the regenerative powers that JJ has become the obvious central theme of the game, regenerating from a grievous injury both psychological and physical (though I wish that the game had not come out and plainly stated this in a line of dialogue at one point, we're not idiots Swery). The story is fairly cliché, even though the manner in which it is told is highly unusual. Despite that though, the execution of the familiar tale is handled with surprising deftness. Clues are fed to the viewer at a steady rate, never so much that you guess everything that is going on, and never so little that you get bored with how opaque everything is. The problem is, that the story and the gameplay feel totally isolated from each other unfolding in two different boxes rather than unified into a coherent whole. All the story is present in the form of text messages while all the gameplay unfolds in the puzzle platforming sections, and they only occasionally intersect in a meaningful way.