Finding What Was Lost: A Reflection on The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

I did not expect to find myself crying on a Saturday night.

After picking up The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, a game that I had found interesting based on what I’d heard about it — that the main protagonist was a girl who couldn’t die, no matter what happened to her, and that she was trying to find her missing best friend/love interest — and reading about how long it would take to beat, I figured it would be a quick and hopefully interesting romp to play through while I had the time over the Christmas holiday.

It was, but it didn’t take long to realize it was so much more than that. Even after I had finished the game, I found myself thinking about it. I quickly turned around and beat it a second time, but even that didn’t stop me from thinking about it.

Now it’s been over five months since I beat the game, and it’s still on my mind. Hearing the ending theme still makes me want to cry.

The MISSING is not the first game I’ve beaten and loved, and thought about after — I couldn’t name the first one, but the most recent is probably Nier: Automata. It is not my favorite game from a gameplay perspective, or a soundtrack perspective, or any of the other metrics that are so often used to judge games. It’s not the game I’ve spent the most time on, and collectively, it’s probably not even the game I’ve spent the most time thinking about.

It is, without a doubt, the game that has had the most visceral impact on me that I can remember.

When I originally tried to sit down and write about it, I had intended to view it from a critical lense — generally, when I write about games, I want to try to add something of value to the discussion. It isn’t always something that hasn’t been said before, or anything revolutionary, but I want to feel as though I’m contributing to the conversation, not just piling onto already-made points. But the more I sat down and tried to work on that piece, the more I thought about how much the game meant to me, personally, to have struck such a chord in my brainspace.

So, this is personal.

If you’re looking for a review, or an analysis of themes, this isn’t the place you are going to see that — I might still end up writing that critical piece later, but I have to get this down on paper first. Even if no one reads it, or no one else feels the way I do about it, I need it to exist, if only to organize my own thoughts. It’s selfish, but it’s what I feel I need to do.

I wanted to avoid spoilers in writing this, but it’s not really possible to do that, since it’s the story — and the core concept of the game — that I’ve found I relate to the most.

So, it should go without saying, but I want to emphasize — if you have any interest in playing this game, at all, you should stop reading this and play it. I don’t want anyone’s experience ruined because they read this. Everyone who wants to play it deserves the right to experience this game — I assure you that my writing isn’t worth taking that away from yourself.

Additionally, the game itself warns before the start that there is suicidal imagery and explicit violence — something I also want to warn about before reading on. There isn’t any gory visuals here, but if discussion of these topics is upsetting, it’d be a good idea to stop reading.

Without further ado, let’s jump in.

The MISSING, J.J. Macfield, and Me

Self-acceptance is a simple concept, in theory and in words — it’s splattered all over the internet, with motivational tweets and Facebook posts that every girl you knew in high school seems to share, and that I myself have been guilty of posting, too. In practice, it is far more complicated.

This is especially true if you are someone who is LGBTA, or who has ever struggled with your mental health, or both. Saying, ‘accept yourself’, is one thing — actually doing it is another, when your brain is telling you that you don’t matter, that you’re a freak or an outlier, or if you feel that your own self-acceptance will come at the cost of severing relationships with the people you love.

Explicit in The MISSING’s themes is the idea of self-acceptance — towards the end of the game, one character straight up says ‘Accept urself!”. However, it is not just saying it that creates the impact. It is how the game plays out, and how the story unfolds, that really drives home the point of not only how difficult it is to find that acceptance, but how unrelenting painful it can be, too.

Throughout the game, J.J., the main character, mutilates herself on saws, lets herself be burned by fire, and gets sliced up by a monster holding a box cutter in the supposed pursuit of her missing best friend, Emily, and each injury is treated with mortal impact. The player hears her screams, the way her voice diminishes whenever she’s hurt, in a way that conveys actual pain. This self-mutilation comes at a cost, even if she can heal herself right after. It’s still a video game and that pain still isn’t real to the player, but unlike most other games, where you only really have to react to a bar on the screen going down, there’s no bar here. You see J.J.’s body gradually grow to be less and less, and every single slice and snap feels as uncomfortable as the first.

While all of this extreme violence is happening, J.J. is receiving texts from her friends and her mother, from things as mundane as what videos her classmate is working on, to texts from her mother about how glad she is that J.J. did not grow up to be ‘abnormal’ — and what that implied abnormality entails.

Of course, J.J. is what her mother would call ‘abnormal’ — it’s very heavily hinted at during the opening sequence, and subsequent messages, that her and Emily’s relationship goes beyond the realm of simply friends. On first glance, it may seem like that’s all there is to it; until the player progresses further, and it becomes apparent that what J.J. is struggling with isn’t just her sexuality, but her gender, too.

This contrast of extreme self-harm, and the agony that it causes J.J., with the normalcy and the pressure of her friends and family, serves as a very visceral metaphor for self-harm and mental illness, and how often someone struggling with these things can appear to be perfectly fine to everyone else.

The entire premise of the game centers around J.J.’s chase of Emily, and her being pursued by a monster (the Hairshrieker, the aforementioned box-cutter wielding baddie), but aside from these two presences, J.J. ultimately fights through the trials of the game alone. F.K., her stuffed animal, texts her throughout, and texts from her past appear as the player progresses, but these characters are physically absent from the game itself, leaving J.J. to tackle the trials all on her own. The few times the player sees any other forms of life, they are running away, or hidden, or trying to hurt her. She is, aside from the texts on her phone, completely alone.

For most of the game, she responds to F.K.’s messages with hostility, and dismissal. Even when he tries to comfort her, she pushes him away, because there is no way that he can understand what she’s going through. While she’s distraught over the disappearance of Emily, and dealing with everything that’s getting thrown at her, she still feels the need to bear it all by herself, and rejects the only form of comfort available to her for the majority of the game.

It is these struggles, the player learns, that drove J.J. to attempt suicide in real life — which is what sends her spiraling into the hellish dreamscape between life and death that the player has to navigate. Handling her mother’s expectations — that she be the perfect heir to the family, the perfect son, that she have a strong career and that she takes care of herself physically — combines with her classmates bullying to push her to the most drastic measure one can take.

While I can’t relate to having to undergo trials and pain while being chased by a giant hair monster in a dream, and I can’t relate to the idea of being outed without my own consent — thankfully — I still find a lot of myself in J.J.. As someone who has struggled with heavy depression and anxiety throughout my life, nearly to the extent that J.J. does, as well as someone who is LGBTA and who fears rejection due to that in pretty much every aspect of their life, much of J.J.’s story hit home.

But I don’t think it’s only the relatability of the protagonist that is keeping this game on my mind — I think it’s the fact that my journey has closely mirrored J.J.’s own, and the positive ending the game has has made it stick with me far more than anything else.

There’s no way to eloquently put this — depression and anxiety are total assholes.They have the ability to wreak havoc on one’s relationships, but more often and frequently more impactfully, they create long lasting damage to one’s self. Anxiety sets and depression spikes — and it becomes a perpetual cycle that eventually wears down whoever is dealing with it.

It internalizes in self worth — the person sees themselves as less and less, to the point where even their own existence feels like a burden to the other people around them. Even when they’re hurt, they don’t recognize that as a legitimate pain — they don’t prioritize their own emotions, but rather, everyone else’s comfort. J.J. says as much in texts after she figures out she’s ‘dead’ — ‘now I won’t cause anyone any trouble’ is one of them. Despite her mother treating her horribly, saying that because she’s trans that she’s ‘sick’ in some way, she processed that pain as the inevitable result of being who she is, instead of someone she loves, and who should unconditionally love her, acting horribly.

Maybe that’s why two of the last texts you get from F.K. in-game hit me remarkably hard — first, that someone needed you from the moment you were born, and second, that it was a story about regeneration. If I’m being honest, the whole ending sequence is still with me. It is objectively the most powerful part of the entire game.

I have spent years of my life feeling as though the world would be better without me in it — and for the most part, I wouldn’t talk about this feeling, because I didn’t want to burden anyone else with it. It wasn’t worth the emotional effort they would spend comforting me, and even if I did talk about it, I would just feel bad for taking up someone else’s time. People loved me, but I ran away from them — like J.J. chases Emily in her dream, and even when she catches up, Emily remains out of reach, I was out of reach to everyone and if it ever seemed like that wouldn’t be the case, I just ran further out.

The fear of rejection of your true self is another reason isolation is so appealing. While I am only just starting to be able to relate to J.J. in terms of coming out as trans, I can relate to this aspect in terms of other facets of being LGBTA. While J.J. has a right to believe that people will reject her — her mother outright voiced that she thinks LGBTA people are abnormal — there are others in her life that would, it appears, be supportive. Abby, one of the friends whose texts gets uncovered throughout the story, mentions getting in trouble for standing up for a classmate who was being called a lesbian, and that she didn’t care if she actually was one. Yet J.J. still didn’t feel comfortable talking about her gender and sexuality with this friend — aside from one moment before her suicide attempt when she tries to reach out, only to not get a response until too late due to Abby being busy. The only person in the game to know about J.J. being trans, of her own accord, is Emily, and even then, J.J. expresses relief that they’re still friends, even though it’s been (presumably) quite some time since she came out.

Accepting yourself means accepting yourself in spite of losing those around you and the pain it can create. Because, ultimately, being someone you’re not ends up being painful too — maybe not as painful as losing those close to you, or maybe more. It’s terrifying to have people see you as you are — it’s terrifying because it requires that you’re laid bare. Your self is out there to be judged, rejected, made fun of. But the flip side of that is that you gain happiness from being genuine and doing the things you like to do, and being who you are. The connections you form are so much stronger because they are based on the truth.

For years, I have never let myself be seen. I have always acted in a way that will make the people around me the most comfortable, and not the way that was most comfortable for me. I don’t even know if it made anyone anymore comfortable, but it certainly hurt me to do it, and pushed me farther and farther away from people. Adding depression and anxiety into the mix made everything worse, until I was getting to a point where I just didn’t feel like anyone would ever know me, or would ever actually want to spend time with me as I truly was. That the only way I would ever find connection was if i was a crafted version of myself that others wanted, but the idea of living like that seemed unbearable. It seemed so much easier to just be alone.

While I have never personally dealt with extreme homophobia and transphobia like J.J. experiences in-game, I have dealt with much smaller acts from people close to me. Snide comments about how weird gay people are, how it’s a ‘trend’ and ‘suddenly everyone’s turning gay’. I’ve heard the sneers and comments made behind a trans person’s back about their transition, deadnaming them, using the wrong pronouns. I’ve heard even well-meaning people make totally inappropriate comments about who I love or who I am. It’s not a surprise that I was so horribly isolated for so long — even if I didn’t have to fear violence for being who I was, the fear of rejection was, and is, always there.

But The MISSING is not a story about rejection — it’s a story about regeneration.

When J.J. finally realizes this — and when she vows to accept the pain that comes with her life and continue to live, she regenerates instantly after injury within the dream. Instead of crying out in pain, she’s able to run on fire, regenerate limb after limb, and use spikes to gain height during jumps. During the ending sequence, she even uses her main opponent — one of the only real enemies in the game — to get herself to higher levels.

Life isn’t as straightforward as this — you don’t learn to accept yourself and then painful things suddenly stop hurting. But if you accept and fully embrace yourself, it becomes easier to tackle these things — heartache, sadness, rejection. You have to have firm footing for yourself, and that is something you can’t do if you’re filled with self-hatred and your self-worth is incredibly low. When you’re already internalizing everything, difficult things become so much harder to deal with — because they become a personal issue, rather than something that is frequently happening because of someone else or circumstance. What happened with J.J. was entirely on other people’s hands — her mother’s prejudice and expectations, her classmates evilness in bullying and targeting her. It wasn’t her fault, but it all ends up in her calling herself a freak, a burden, and so many other things.

Learning to accept yourself, no matter that other people may reject you, no matter that being yourself may bring even more hurt — that’s what it’s all about, because the truth is, you’re carrying that pain anyway. But it is much more agonizing to carry alone, to have to put the pieces together every time something happens completely by yourself, and to feel like even the people who say they understand you don’t, or they wouldn’t if only they truly knew who you were.

I have not fully accepted myself. But I am getting there. Piece by piece, I am starting to be more open with people about who I am — what I like to do, the sort of people I love, who I am, fundamentally, as a person. There are many sides of myself that I have spent so long hiding because I felt that I would lose those close to me if I mentioned them, if I was honest about them. But the truth is that those people are gone, anyway — if I can’t be real with myself, I can’t form any genuine connections. There is always a degree of separation, and the only way to make that gap navigable is to be who you truly are.

But the point — to J.J.’s story, to life in general — is to cross that bridge. That’s the whole shake of it, isn’t it? To chase after what makes you happy, but it’s impossible to be happy without being honest about what makes you happy. So long as it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, why shouldn’t you pursue that?

The MISSING culminates with J.J. waking up from her suicide attempt — she’s revived, she’s alive, she knows who she is. And she swears she’ll never get to that place again. The story ends with her and Emily embracing in reality, and J.J. having found what she had lost — herself.

The world after the game is uncertain — even though her mother calls to tell her she loves her, and her friends and cohorts over text seem to feel positively, for the most part, there’s no telling how things go from there. But J.J. is a stronger person — she resolves to never leave Emily again, and she understands who she is. The story leaves on the note that tells the player that things will get better, regardless of whether they actually see them get better or not.

There’s always a chance to give life another shot — there is always time to figure yourself out. The only thing that truly matters to any of it is you, yourself — obviously, not being an asshole to others around you is important, but the only person you ever have to live with forever is yourself. Are you happy with the person you are? What would make you happier, and what’s stopping you from getting there? These are very simple questions that can have very complicated answers, which I am not going to pretend I have. But even just thinking about these things, with the straightforward honesty that they require, can help figure out where you want to be.

Moving forward, I’m going to keep living this way — loving myself fully and without apologies. Reconciling the mistakes I’ve made and how I can improve my behavior so that I don’t repeat them, not internalizing the fact that they happened as character flaws. Being fair and honest with the things that I feel, no matter how much those things hurt, or how much they don’t. I want to be an example of this to other people — I want people to look at me and say, “Because of you, I was able to accept myself. Because of you, I was able to love myself. Because of you, I knew that things could get better.”

These goals are lofty, but they are there. I’m not going to act like playing The MISSING put these goals in my mind — in many ways, they were always there, even when I was struggling, even though it was at that point a distant dream, something too far off to ever see coming to fruition. But The MISSING did make me reflect on this, and on how far I’ve come and how far I can still go, and the fact that as long as I continue to accept myself, it doesn’t matter what happens — I can power through. And that I deserve to be accepted as myself, even on days when it doesn’t feel like it.

Which is really the entire point of the game, and one you don’t have to play more than thirty seconds to understand: