2/5 ★ – DaysposableHero's review of The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.

I really appreciate the message of this game. I think it’s important for the media of video games to tackle these issues and work in these spaces, just as film and television does. Unfortunately, I don’t think this particular effort is very good. Narratively, I was very interested in the characters and their stories. That was really the only thing carrying me through to the end of the game. Despite having to muddle through some seriously strange text culture. I mean, really, teenagers don’t text like that - with excessive use of corporate mascot stickers and ASCII art faces. Who are these kids? Mechanically, I felt the game came up short. The environments were uninteresting, full of obvious video game tropes, like spinning saws for no reason, giant cymbal monkeys, and rows of barbed wire in odd places, like a diner. While these things can be justified with information you get later in the story, that doesn’t help the moment to moment feeling of “Why do the developers think bowling allies have buzz saws under the lanes?” Apart from boring puzzles and uninspired environments, the character’s movement was frustrating. As J.J., you basically have two modes - healthy and injured. For navigation reasons, you often want to take some damage and enter the injured mode, as it affords you different traversal options. I found neither mode to be satisfying. The healthy mode was entirely too light and airy, while the injured mode was frustratingly slow and awkward. Again, this makes sense narratively for an injured person, but it doesn’t make for a fun puzzle/platformer game. That’s The Missing in a nutshell, I think. The design choices make sense from the perspective of what the characters were experiencing, but I don’t think White Owls did a particularly good job of making a compelling video game out of it. I hope that developers keep working in this narrative and cultural space, representing diverse perspectives and life experiences. And I hope that they’re able to do much better than this game in the future.