The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (PS4)

Jackie Jameson Macfield is a 19 year old college student, and like many people at that age, she has begun to learn more about herself at the same time that the pressure to succeed starts to weigh in on her hardest. J.J. Macfield is discovering her identity, but the people in her life are pulling her in different directions as they have their own ideas about who she is. This internal struggle is certainly a painful one, and both her ruminations on her true self and that pain both form the core of the story and the gameplay mechanics of The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.

Emily, J.J.’s love interest, takes J.J. out to an island to get away from the world for a while, but this island proves to be the supernatural Island of Memories where a person’s thoughts and past can manifest as locations and unusual beings. At first though, the two girls are able to enjoy each other’s company in peace, but when Emily is scared away by a large wight with an enormous box cutter, J.J. chases after her. Things get a fair bit worse too when J.J. is struck by lightning and roasted to a crisp.

After an unusual doctor with a moose head stands over her, J.J. finds she isn’t dead despite the incredible damage to her body. In fact, she can now reverse that damage, bringing herself back to normal only to learn that the path ahead to find Emily will involve not only many more cases where she will be maimed, burnt, shocked, and otherwise heavily injured, but there are points where she might have to deliberately injure herself to get through a puzzle. Make no mistake, this side-scrolling puzzle platformer does not dress up the act with humor in a vein similar to the game Suicide Guy, nor does J.J. brush away the pain of the injuries like the hero of NeverDead. Any time J.J. is hurt, even when she must do so deliberately, she is screaming in pain, and when something particularly brutal like getting sucked into an active fan occurs, you can hear the mortal terror in her voice. It can be quite disconcerting to hear such reactions so frequently, especially when there is no choice but to undergo these self-damaging procedures to progress, but the metaphorical extrapolation works specifically because the game never forgets this isn’t supposed to be glorifying such violence. J.J. herself is never bloodied, her body blackening instead with mild splashes of white blood so that the depiction is never horrific or gratuitous. Instead, while this definitely has some ties to real acts of self-harm people engage with to try and deal with painful realities, the game does show a greater meaning to these acts later in the game that helps it avoid uncomfortable implications.

In fact, The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories does a good job of having immediate surface level metaphors to attach your understanding to before revealing the deeper meanings behind it all the further you get into the story. At first, J.J. Macfield’s homosexuality seems to be the root of her troubled mindset, her desire to pursue these feelings conflicting with the societal stigmas her friends and family hold. Her mother in particular appears to be the biggest external pressure, but there is clearly pushback from others in her college to not explore or express her identity. As you get deeper into the story you learn there is even more to this struggle than that immediately apparent layer, and J.J. becomes a rather complex character who you come to understand fairly well primarily through the text messages your phone gradually recovers as you explore deeper into the island.

While the main plot covers most of the broad strokes of this personal journey for J.J., the texts really feel like where we get to know her. Besides the conversations with Emily and J.J.’s mother that are given at key points in the story, there are four other characters who all contribute new angles and help us better see J.J.’s personality since she can’t express it much while running around the island. One of the professor’s at the college gives us a good look at how she handles her school life, a girl named Lily has a blatant crush on J.J. and pries into her romantic views, a punk girl named Abby helps J.J. try to explore expressing herself truly and openly, and Phillip is a rich and entitled classmate who oddly enough draws out J.J.’s feminine side most despite being rather terse with him at times. Reading these different conversations all build our protagonist into a more fleshed out character so that we can better empathize with her during the big dramatic swings the story starts to take near the end, and many of them do a lot to foreshadow the story’s path or are made far more interesting when considered in retrospect.

Unfortunately, these tertiary characters will only have their text messages appear after you collect varying amounts of the game’s optional collectible: donuts. If such a strange and silly item to find floating around in the air feels like a bit of a tonal whiplash, it’s because The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories does admittedly undermine its tone at various different points. As you chase after Emily during the plot, she begins to speak in an unusual manner, the voice actress having learned to speak a line backwards and then having it reversed to make it sound surreal and unnatural. Having the moose-head doctor around using a similar voice and giant cymbal monkeys as enemies seems to show the game is aiming for a dream-like feeling even though it clashes with the often heavy subject matter, but Emily speaking in this way slows down her dialogue and makes it feel like she’s trimming her lines short so that she can’t express herself the best. She’s still able to establish enough about herself and that important relationship she has with J.J., but the text messages perhaps hit the tonal problems hardest as all of the characters besides J.J.’s mother and her professor all use character-specific emoji stickers frequently. Having a dramatic conversation interspersed with a cartoon donut man giving the other person the middle finger or an enormous buff cat threatening to “meowtilate” someone really risks robbing some moments of their emotional impact, particularly the ones involving the worst conversational partner: your burnt up stuffed animal.

Somehow able to contact you after it was fried in the same lightning bolt, your stuffed animal messages at you at key points in the story as well, and while it is appropriate for it to sound almost childlike after suddenly coming to life, the first half of the game J.J. is just lashing out at it and refusing to believe it is the toy talking to her. When she finally does speak to it at times to ponder her situation with Emily, it proves to be a fairly poor conversational partner. You can mostly shrug it off and still enjoy the well-written story around these moments, but there is a point near the end where one of the most shocking events takes place and before it’s even had much time to sink in your stuffed animal is babbling at you to rob the moment of some of its impact. It’s fortunate so much of the rest of the story was done right to counterbalance this poor concept, but it does feel like there should have been a better method for sharing the few relevant thoughts J.J. provides during these chats.

Turning attention to the gameplay now, the puzzles featured in The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories can be quite involved and clever. As mentioned before, your main method of solving many of them will be some form of intentional self mutilation, and the most commonly leaned on version of this is dismemberment. While it will impede her ability to walk or move objects, cutting off your limbs will allow J.J. to do things like hurl your leg up at something out of reach or weigh down something with your body’s missing pieces. Cut down your body enough and you can also reduce yourself to a little hopping head, this allowing J.J. to slip into small areas while still being able to move around in case there are deadly saws or other hazards in those tight spaces. Sometimes hitting an object like a spinning saw will propel you upward after dealing its damage, the player able essentially get a super jump out of leaping onto a dangerous object.

J.J. can die if she is damaged too much, but this will just lead to respawning at a checkpoint to try the puzzle again. Being cut apart too many times without rejuvenating your body or falling into special substances like swamp water seem to be the only times this happens though. There are still more ways J.J. can solve puzzles with her body though, such as igniting herself so she can burn things she touches or taking a hit to the head so that her world will literally turn upside down. All of these are dependent on finding the right object or enemy to render you in such a state, and sometimes the puzzle is more about finding out how to take the right kind of damage rather than what you do with the power afterward. The area variety does lead to a good amount of puzzle formats though, such as a construction site where you’ll be constantly flipping the world upside down to access different switches, a lumber mill where you will need to rely on dismembering yourself in the right areas, and an abandoned train where you need to find a way to both get the train moving and burn yourself so you can clear up the obstructions to the back cars. Donuts are often placed to reward exploration or creative applications of your different injured states, with special statues of a donut store mascot giving a big batch all at once to make earning the extra text message conversations easier. Even if you don’t grab them the first run through you can chapter select to grab them after the story is done, and you don’t actually need all of them to get all of the optional texts, the others instead providing concept art, costumes, and other little goodies.

Despite the pain tied to the puzzles they are often designed very well to keep the player thinking on how to apply the options at hand to make progress, but there are a few moments in the story where you need to outrun the box-cutter wielding wight as well. These segments often ask you to figure out little areas while you’re on the move, so if you aren’t quick to solve a basic puzzle you might get caught, but just like the other methods of dying there isn’t much of a setback and you can try again with ease. While the chase sections are certainly weaker since they’re mostly just time sensitive puzzles with less moving parts than the ones you complete at your leisure, it does help the game keep up a good mix of play styles. It can sometimes get rather slow waiting for J.J. to repair herself after an injury or moving around when your body is barely holding together, so a brief burst of adrenaline helps keep the slow pace of the puzzle solving from devolving into something outright sluggish.

THE VERDICT: The emotional tale of a girl grappling with her identity in a hostile world really comes through nicely in The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories primarily because of the attention put into the protagonist. While unfortunately some of the interesting conversations rely on finding collectibles to see, they are still easy enough to unlock and help build up a heroine with a good degree of depth that the player can better empathize with. The story packs a punch to be sure even if certain aspects seem surreal simply for the sake of it or even threaten to undermine the tone when they crop up, but the deeper meaning found in the dialogue and metaphors on show ensure an overall compelling narrative. The puzzle solving is solid as well, making good use of the injury mechanic and varied environments to keep testing the player in new ways.

And so, I give The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories for PlayStation 4…

A GOOD rating. The personal plight of J.J. Macfield may be the most compelling part of this game, but the puzzles thankfully hold up their end of the experience as well. While it can be hard to hear J.J. scream with every necessary injury and her slow movement and recovery do threaten to bog down the pace, the metaphorical meaning is sound once the full picture is there to see and the actual actions taken during the adventure require some creative thought as new variables enter the picture. It’s not always as effective as it could have been, the chase sections mostly being about noticing your options rather than figuring out how to use J.J.’s damage states to your advantage, but if any immediate areas for improvement should be noted, it’s the way some of the conversations are delivered. The texts with J.J.’s mother are done excellently because they crop up at the key points in the plot they need to in order to deliver important info and give us a better look into J.J.’s mind, but the ones sent to her friends are going to appear once you hit certain donut collection thresholds when they have a gradual growth in relevance as well. Collecting all of the donuts you notice along the way still keeps the texts close on the timeline they were received before the island wiped the phone’s memory, but considering how helpful these are to building up our protagonist as a character, they could have been doled out better. At least only the stuffed animal is the only one that feels outright tone destroying in the way he chats and uses emoji stickers, and while some levity is appreciated in between moments of sensitive subjects and heavy ideas, the game can sometimes be a little too surreal or silly for its own good.

Many games that prioritize their story can let the gameplay fall to the wayside or simply serve as a means of connecting story beats, but The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories manages to not only provide an interesting puzzle platformer underneath its deep journey of self-discovery, but it has those mechanics tie into the metaphors. For the most part it was certain storytelling choices that hold this back from having the emotional impact it mostly works towards building quite well. A rather harmonious relationship between the interactive and narrative elements means the important themes are able to come across more strongly. J.J. Macfield’s journey to find herself manages to make the player think not only on how to use unique puzzle mechanics but on how a complex young woman struggles to accept her identity despite the world pushing back against her for being herself.