The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (Nintendo Switch) Review

A very common comparison that many fans of Swery will say that he is the "David Lynch" of video games when that could not be further from reality. It is very shallow to compare Swery to David Lynch, since there is no David Lynch of video games. A comparison like this suggests a complete misunderstanding of David Lynch and just because Deadly Premonition rips off Twin Peaks, only suggests that Swery is merely derivative.

With The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, Swery finds himself basically taking many of the same plot elements from his most well-known cult hit. In fact Deadly Premonition, D4 and the currently in development Kickstarter project The Good Life, all centre on a woman who gets savagely murdered in the woods with a strong middle-Americana aesthetic. The Missing, is not deviating much from Swery's playbook.

One thing is very apparent when playing The Missing and is that it looks and feels like all the worst aspects of a Swery game. For the uninitiated, that means it looks like a budget PlayStation 2 game at best, or an N64 game at worst. Character animations are sluggish, and snap into positions unnaturally, and on Switch the frame rate is sub-30fps, with many dropped frames. It can be inconsistent with some interesting visuals; like how the sky is rendered by using actual recorded footage of a sky which is a very creative and striking. Too bad how all the trees look really low-res and look like something a first year computer graphics artist would make.

This is not just with the background foliage, but most of the environments end up looking very cheap with only a few sparks of inspiration. Even the silly over-sized video game-y doughnuts end up looking more like large life-saver mints, and for some reason that spider-baby thing from Toy Story makes an appearance. The character models feel like they were outsourced by a more talented team of CG artists, since they stick out like a sore thumb when exploring this deluge of mediocrity that befouls even a low grade Zenith CRT display. When he worked at Access Games, Swery did prove he could deliver something with a cohesive art direction with D4. It is amazing how The Missing somehow manages to look worse and uglier than Deadly Premonition.

It may not look like much, but the reason why anyone would play anything from Swery is not for his discerning eye for visual fidelity or polish. Some may say that the ugly graphics in his games are part of the experience... or make his games… "charming." What people want is quirky gameplay from a quirky game designer. With his own indie development studio, there is no excuse of meddling like when Microsoft terminated any hopes for a continuation of D4, or when publishers demanded Deadly Premonition to have broken Resident Evil 4 controls.

The Missing proves that White Owls Inc. can bungle even a simplistic puzzle platformer all by themselves. The puzzle-platformer genre will always be compelling and in the right hands, it can be mesmerizing. The Missing took a great idea of making self-mutilation into a game mechanic to solve puzzles and made it so boring. Remember Wario Land 3? Remember how Wario was able to get inflicted with various kinds of statuses depending how he got hurt and how each affliction was sort of a power-up? That is this game but with worse controls and some instances of egregious unintuitive puzzle design that will betray the logical thinking of any human with a working brain.

White Owls Inc. did manage to add a few new wrinkles to this kind of game in the form of dismemberment that creates utility for J.J.'s severed limbs. Rolling around as a severed head is darkly amusing even if making it jump comes with a nasty delay. Other than that, there is just too many derivative instances from Wario Land 3 to notice. Even on its own merits, this kind of bizarre dark comedic element betrays the core theme of The Missing's twist-ending.

Even with the laughably ham-fisted and schmaltzy opening message from the director, it is hard to take any of this seriously. Maybe this is the result of the director just going through the motions at this point and is just desperately trying to give people another Deadly Premonition. The issue is that game was the result of art meeting adversity. The Missing has no adversity because Swery had complete control.