This final bit is much less important to me, but everything else about this game kind of just sucks also; the controls are incredibly sluggish, the game crashed multiple times (including twice at the same point near the end of the game, forcing me to go through several minutes of unskippable cutscenes multiple times over), the cheesy reaching towards artfulness (any time real-world video is spliced in looks like garbage), and the low quality of both the phone-conversation writing and the puzzles themselves.

really resonate with these thoughts: when i first played The Missing as someone who was really mentally crystalizing the inescapable fact that they Were Trans, this game felt hugely important and resonant at the time, i really loved it. in many ways i do feel like the way this game talks about pain and the destruction of a seemingly invulnerable body still really hits for me. however time has been very unkind to it. part of this is that SWERY has done an superb job of obliterating the read that this was in any way a reflective response to the transphobia of Deadly Premonition with both his wholehearted support of abusers in the industry as well as the absolutely vociferous trans panic elements of Deadly Premonition 2, but also because it's increasingly difficult for me to feel like this comes from a place of understanding and more from a place of aggressive Allyship that Doesn't Really Get It in a way that a lot of vocal Allies don't. i still kinda like it but I think this review is really on the point in pretty much all respects.

I completely agree on your read of The Missing being from "a place of aggressive Allyship that Doesn't Really Get It", and I really appreciate you responding as it's honestly a pretty big relief that someone whose opinions I really respect agrees with how I felt about this game as I definitely feel a little bit weird about how completely at odds my response was to the response of basically all the other trans reviewers I've seen. Maybe if this game had been released back when I was dealing with figuring out my own gender stuff it might have been helpful for me, or had a positive impact on my understanding of myself, but I've been out as trans for a decade now and anything with this sort of tone just exhausts and frustrates me.

I purchased this game before I knew about Swery’s Continuing Deal after hearing perpetually how well meaning and self-improving he was along with the generally good reception it received when it came out and I have never been able to muster the stomach to actually play it. I feel like the further we get from it and the more secure in my sense of gender I become the angrier this would make me. I just wish I could remove it from my Switch Games Owned page, where it will forever sit at the very bottom, unlaunched.

CW here for I guess like clinics description of bodily mutilation? Also Needles

For me I think there is this interesting thing of like, big disclaimer obvi because I haven’t played the game, but like the self-flagellation that is central to the game and the game’s conception is interesting conceptually because while that DOES veer close to terf shit it does also in some respect mirror my own conception of my body? Not in a wholly negative way but there is an element of like, part of how I treat my dysphoria is via injecting hormones and I do think of that as kind of a violent act right like I am jabbing myself with a needle and tearing my skin and pushing a thing in there and it’s this very intimate form of medical application.

And part of wanting to be a person with a more feminized body does involve like, making sometimes over time extreme physical changes and to me there is something grotesque about the body inherently and I feel strong resonance with the idea of like breaking an arm to set it another way or build it back better every if that’s not a literal trans thing. And there is a lot of media that is about body horror or that involves the body generally that FEELS trans to me even though it isn’t by trans people or actually purposefully about that. There is probably a better way to organize that thought but like, off the cuff I hope I have communicated the feeling. I think the TLDR is I am not opposed to the kind of things that SPECIFICALLY the violent imagery in this game seems to want to directly be about IN THEORY.

However I do not trust any cis person and especially not a fuckin loser idiot like Swery to try to make a thing about that explicitly in relation to the trans experience and it does sound like he picked the most rote and lazy and impossibly boring way to go with it which fuckin sucks man what’s his fuckin problem jesus

That makes a lot of sense poyfuh, and I think you communicated those feelings well. I definitely do see some of what you talk about in certain areas of trans culture where bodies are at times rendered as these things to rebel against and fight back at tooth-and-nail, looking at the trans people who romanticise the idea of robotic bodies, or who find some sense of kinship with the monstrous, the eldritch, the unknowable (one of my favourite pieces of trans writing, "the seam of skin and scales", is loaded with this stuff), and thoughts of how much I've seen of those ideas did pop into my head whilst playing this game.

And maybe considering all of that my review does talk a bit too much in broad strokes against the notion of using self-flagellation at all, it's a framing that a trans artist who conceives of their body in those terms could potentially make something really impactful from, but if I do come across as overly opposed to this idea then that's only because Swery's take on this just makes me so frustrated and tired both because he seems oblivious to any of the actual meaning that metaphors in this area could carry, and because there's this level of focus on the screams, the bone crunches, the pain of it all that just makes it feel stomach-churning to me rather than transformative or empowering.

Right exactly there is like a huge seismic gulf of difference between the two kinds of things you’re describing haha. I don’t think you come out like overly opposed to the idea at all I think you def clearly are just like YO THIS SUCKS.

Like I think it frequently happens that art made by non trans or non queer people often unintentionally resonates or even resonates by accident but the flip side of that is a dude like swery trying seemingly to do it on purpose and making the most rote boring borderline offensive (and certainly offensive to some sensibilities, as is evident) version of this narrative and stapled it to a queer character. I am generally not the type to get like heated about this sort of thing because there is plenty of bad art out there I just think swery can suck my ass haha