It's been a hot minute since I last checked out a Swery game. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only other game of his I've played was Deadly Premonition, which I blogged about almost nine years ago. Dude's been busy since then, of course, focusing on smaller-scale Indie/doujin games since forming his own studio, White Owls, after leaving Access Games (with whom he made Deadly Premonition, D4, and others). White Owls's first game is this, the loquaciously-titled The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, a puzzle-platformer with a dark psychological horror bent and a mild vein of black humor running through it. It concerns the titular J.J. Macfield, a student vacationing with her girlfriend Emily on the equally titular Island of Memories, an accursed New England isle that operates similarly to Silent Hill with its bespoke illusionary torments for its visitors. Emily vanishes from their campsite and J.J. takes pursuit, though it's clear the island is nothing as it first seemed.

The game typically gives you environmental puzzles to deduce in order to make progress, with J.J. capable of pushing and pulling boxes, jumping across gaps and lifting herself up ledges, and either crawling on all-fours or on her stomach (the latter putting you even lower to the ground) in order to squeeze through tight spaces. An unfortunate gift, provided early on, is that she is effectively immortal: she can, and does, take considerable physical damage but can use this undying state to solve puzzles. For instance, setting herself on fire means being able to ignite other flammable objects as well as light up the surroundings. There's a few of these, and you'll be regularly putting J.J. in harm's way to take advantage of them both out of necessity and for collectibles (though severely injuring her just for the latter feels a little insensitive). At any point, you can hold the resurrect button and regain any missing limbs and heal all flesh wounds. The only true death state occurs when J.J. is reduced to just her head and she loses that too, presumably as losing your head in a psychological horror game generally spells the end.

The game does what it can to mitigate the level of gore you'll be witnessing on a regular basis through a set of visual filters—J.J. becomes a silhouette if she's taken lethal damage—but you still get a full audio suite of pained screams and squishy noises which can be... a little much to deal with sometimes. You're eventually inured to the pain, much like J.J. herself is, but because the game takes steps to make her a sympathetic protagonist that's had a hard life it's a rough time for any player's emotional investment. That's not to say The Missing is the only game with a similar mechanic—the much-derided NeverDead and the forgotten 3D mascot platformer Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy also used the flexible undead states of their protagonists to allow them to survive perils that would kill anyone living—but it's one of the few to play it as the serious detriment to one's mental health that it would be rather than for laughs. That said, for as much as the game tends to stick to a grim tone Swery's eccentricities are all over it, as might be expected: J.J. is obsessed with donuts to the point she'll injure herself to get at them, and the game has Twin Peaks-style backwards speaking from both the missing Emily and a strange deer doctor I'm half-convinced is a projection of a real doctor looking after a comatose J.J. in a hospital somewhere.

I'm also starting to grok that there's a whole symbolism side to the game's narrative. The game establishes right after booting up the game that its development was made with LGBTQ+ representation in mind and the right for anyone to be what they are, and J.J.'s same-sex relationship with Emily might not necessarily be the extent of that: during the game, the player is able to unlock more of J.J.'s chat history on her phone (which doubles as the pause menu) and it slowly reveals her troubles with transitioning genders, receiving loving support from Emily and strong opposition from her conservative mother. The whole physical deformation aspect presumably ties in with latent feelings of body dysmorphia, lending more credence to the idea that the events of the game are all in J.J.'s head (or the island's targeting her neuroses). I haven't reached the end quite yet, but I'm guessing I'm close to its conclusion if the achievement trackers for collectibles are anything to go by, so I figured I'd try to talk around the game's revelations before it spells it all out for me.

For as gruesome as the game can be the puzzles are generally well thought out and it's visually sharp with its use of 3D characters and level design in a fixed 2D perspective. It's usually pretty easy to tell what items and hotspots you can interact with due to their orange sheen and I've missed several collectibles so far, which speaks to how well they've been hidden (fortunately, I can swing back with a level select feature if I feel like it). The game can be a little visually glitchy and I've been stuck a couple times due to doing something the game perhaps didn't anticipate a player would do; hitting the restart chapter button on the pause menu means having to do those puzzles again, but it'll always save your collectibles at least and leave ghosts for those you've already found, helpful for anyone following a guide during a post-game clean-up. It's accommodating in a way Deadly Premonition rarely was, for as much as I love that game for other reasons, and I'm heartened that Swery put just as much of his personality into this one via the optional chat logs, the Stephen King-esque setting, and general weirdness. Maybe reined in a little more compared to Deadly Premonition or D4 due to the game's heavier themes, but still very much present. I'll be sure to check out some of White Owls's other games at some point in the future also, like the kitty transformation game The Good Life and Hotel Barcelona, a mysterious collab with No More Heroes's Suda 51 and Silent Hill's Keiichiro Toyama.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)