The Missing is a Perfect Marriage of Gameplay and Theme

Sometimes the “game” part of a game is just that, a game. How you jump, how you run, the goons you shank – it’s meant to be fun, thrilling, challenging, and often invokes the genre of the storytelling. In the end, there’s no metaphor to be found behind the mechanics at work. Bullet time isn’t meant to make the player question the nature of time itself, it doesn’t serve to remind you to “stop and smell the roses.” It’s included in games because The Matrix did it, and it’s cool and it makes the player feel like a boss.

However, sometimes there are games that use their gameplay to convey an essential part of the story, one that might not be so on-the-nose obvious. In a game like Gris, an otherwordly journey through the stages of grief setup like a puzzle platformer; the powers you acquire as you progress fit neatly into the theme. The player’s character first learns to withstand the mighty winds by transforming into a heavy stone. Later, she will navigate a dark underwater maze by becoming fluid and fast and will learn to soar high by finding the little birdies stowed away in their cages and freeing them.

They could’ve granted your character laser eyes, teleporting, or the ability to grow small or large at will, but Gris isn’t that kind of story. It wouldn’t have served the theme. Instead, her powers all speak to coping mechanisms she develops through hardship; resilience, adaptability, reinvention. Through these powers she begins to feel again and allow joy back into her life.

This idea of gameplay married to theme is never more apparent nor more elegantly employed than in infamous Japanese video game director, SWERY’s most recent game, The Missing: J.J. Macfield and The Island of Memories. In the game you play as a girl named JJ, wandering a phantasmagoric fairy tale world searching for her friend Emily after she goes missing while camping in the woods. In the midst of her search for Emily, JJ is struck by lightning and instead of dying as her body is ripped and burned into chunks, she comes back together whole, no worse for wear.

During the course of the game the player will toss JJ into harm’s way in order to solve a series of brain tickling puzzles that can often only be overcome by igniting, dismembering or breaking JJ’s body in myriad grotesque ways. In the process, the player tries to piece together her memory of the events that lead her here via a series of txt messages from her friends, family, and even her plushie FK. 

After an opening that plays like a twee Shojo manga, the game drops you into a brutal world of gruesome violence but… this isn’t Mortal Kombat. The violence isn’t meant to provide visceral thrills or elicit high fives with your buds.

With each cut, tear, concussive blow and bone shattering fall, we glimpse a clearer picture of who JJ is – her persistence. In the early going JJ seems like a victim of this looping Lynchian nightmare, arms akimbo as she daintily flees from her pursuer, a boxcutter wielding specter with long dark hair. Yet, the more blood she lets, the more fire that burns her, the stronger her resolve becomes. We don’t know why her world is so treacherous when we first face its challenges but we know that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get through them.

I want to talk about the ending now so I’m going to ask that you not spoil the game if you haven’t played it yet. Going on this journey with JJ is ENTIRELY THE POINT. 

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

After a devastating crescendo in which JJ comes upon Emily hanging from a makeshift gallows at the top of a building, and then joins her in death, the game reveals the twist most players have guessed at this point; in the real world she’s dead (or dying.)

The txt messages, now fully discovered, paint the picture of JJ as a people pleaser, and a girl being penned in from the expectations of others. When her conservative leaning mother gets nosy and uncovers JJ’s secret, which I had not quite guessed at this point, JJ lashes out at Emily, her closest confidante and ally. Meanwhile in the dream, one hundred years passes (seriously) and after an extended sequence in which JJ becomes the final boss, she gets a pep talk from her plushie FK that this isn’t a dream about JJ just surviving the horrors of her mental hell, it’s about her regenerating and being born anew.

At this point the game pulls its greatest trick and JJ goes from a ladylike jog into a full on sprint, shirking off each cut and burn like it was a temporary inconvenience. In the game this is demonstrated by a golden glow and a new power that allows JJ to instantly regenerate. With the ghoulish specter in hot pursuit, at one point JJ flies through an open door and begins her laborious and overly familiar animation of closing the door, being grabbed and then skittering away only to shake it off and ask aloud “What am I doing?,” a delicious fourth wall break and a nod to the deliberate pacing of this scene when it occurred in pre-revelation gameplay. It’s further evidence that JJ’s completed her journey from passive victim to active heroine. From then on it’s a fight to reclaim herself once and for all.

In the final scene the player’s suspicions are confirmed; JJ slit her wrists and is bleeding out. Then they drop a bombshell on you, the long blonde haired girl you’ve been playing as in the dream, now lying on the floor of a school building, has the body and voice of a man.

That’s right. JJ is queer and in my read of the text, based upon my own trans experience, they’re transgender. I will now shift to they/them pronouns for JJ out of respect to the myriad possible interpretations.

Suddenly it all makes sense. The unbreakable bond between JJ and Emily was forged in shared secrets; Emily is gay and JJ is queer. JJ has been trying to understand if and how they can be with her in a romantic sense but the stress of the bullying and mental hoops they’ve had to jump through and constantly putting the needs of others before their own, has worn them down and robbed them of their light. 

Every bit of pain and anguish we experienced as JJ in the dream was a mental projection of a person who faced down incredible adversity in their life, who wrestled with their identity and ultimately lost their will to fight, only to find the wherewithal to live, to love and to accept who they are. We know this because we lived it too, through each slice and dice and cracked cranium. The Missing demonstrates that when gameplay furthers the goals of storytelling, it transcends mere button pressing, and becomes an extension of ourselves, even if sometimes that means dismembering that “extension” and using it to stop a grinding gear.