The Missing is...a hard game to talk about. I think it really needs to be experienced to be understood. It's also a hard game to recommend, given both the content warnings required (extreme violence and body horror) and some of the subject matters tackled (self-harm, dysphoria, suicide). However, it touched me in a way very few games have managed to, and i couldn't be more thankful to have played it.

The gameplay is basically if Limbo or Inside decided to make death a mechanic. You struggle forward using the harm the environment brings to yourself, by using your limbs to solve different puzzles. In and of itself, it's just a dark twist on a pretty-overdone genre, but this gimmick in turn perfectly resonates with the core themes of the game and the story itself.

I'm sorry i'm keeping it vague, i genuinely want to say the least bit possible aside from what could genuinely hurt some people, so please heed the warnings of the first paragraph, and if it seems like it won't bother you TOO much, go ahead and play it.

The Missing is an absolutely breathtaking experience and one of the best uses of ludo-narrative in a game i've seen in a long time. You suffer along with the main character, and the visuals, sound design and ambience all contribute to it so goddamn well. And that Finale is legit one of the best i've come across in gaming period.

So uh, play it, but only if you feel you can take it, because it IS a very hard game. Not in terms of difficulty mind you, just in terms of...uh...taking it all in.

Edit (18/10/2022): I have different pronouns now, thank you Swery.

How to start.... I have alot to say about that game which will be definitely a favorite of mine for a very long time. I'm pretty confident that I played the game at the right moment without adding more to that, people who know me will know what I'm talking about.

I personally loved almost all aspect of the game ? I know the gameplay definitely can put away some people but I think it was actually good ? At the moment that you take thing.. as a gameplay mechanic it just become a really interesting way to solve puzzles across all the levels in the game. Talking about them, I think the game have a really great variety of levels and puzzle, the zones are construct in a way where they introduce you the new mechanic in an easy way and after that they start to mix it with old mechanics. In the end I played the whole game in one day and it was a really fun experience to do in one sitting, I actually recommend that alot because of how the story is told.

The story use a classic schema of puzzle narration where they start by giving you very few informations and start to adding more and more info to in the end let the player solve the whole story by themselves.

Talking about that, it's worth to note that the content of the story can really hurt some people at a certain point since it show really hard topic to handle depending of who you are. I really feel like this the one part that I really want to put a content warning trigger because it can hurt really bad.

Personally on that specific point without going in specifics... It really got me hard lol. like I only finished the game 2-3 hours ago so my thoughts about it aren't that much clear currently but.. it just spoke to me and I actually can't believe a cis guy living in Japan wrote that. The narration is just so impressive in the last part and it just make everything you experienced before so worth it.

Now talking about the musics, The levels themselves don't really have musics, but the game use alot ambient sound to give an uncomfortable which really work with it. Some musics play at specifics point and they are all great, specially the sounds with vocals just have fantastic lyrics.

I don't really have other stuff to add.. well I would want to talk alot more.. but I keep for in private with my friends because the game got me on a really big personal level again.

Yeah... in my top 5 of all time for a long time.

While it sacrifices some quality on the individual mysteries early on they're mostly essential for the kind of narrative flipsides Kodaka executes in the full runtime of raincode.

Arguably his best work, while I still quite easily prefer V3 it's fucking incredible for a creator to only leap ahead from that while putting the franchise to rest and still retain his charm and strengths to the fullest.

I do think he is a bit lost on how to interweave murder mysteries into a larger than life mystery narrative this time around as he's not using the death game structure but that lets him be so much more creative and expansive with the world and setting, which raincode absolutely needed. And at the end of the day it's rewarded thoroughly. Here's to hoping raincode 2 fixes that.