But I'm writing about Missing. It's got a great premise: an investigative reporter and his girlfriend (who turns out to be more than a girlfriend) have gone missing. The web-based documentary film company he works for received a CD, which they at first dismissed as a prank, but have found new proof that it was sent by whoever has kidnapped the pair. It's full of puzzles and it's all encyphered, and instead of turning it over to the proper authorities, they're making it available to the public at large in the hopes that someone will be able to figure it all out. It's kind of like SETI-at-home of crime solving.
It's all very creepy, and it's an old game-- four years old, in fact. It relies heavily on websites and even email in order to tell its story, so it's a good test of whether a persistent ARG can work.It doesn't.
There are really three reasons for this, first, a sequel called Evidence: The Last Ritual has already come out (and I have it, and it's in my "to be played" pile). So, for instance, a very early puzzle tells me the answer I need to continue is at http://www.xeniph.com/ which forwards you to http://www.xineph.com/31504052414/ which is a nifty little puzzle. If you solve it (which I did), you will not get an answer that will allow you to progress on the CD. In fact, that puzzle occurs nowhere in Missing at all, so I can only theorize that it's for Evidence. Yet some provision for players of Missing should have been made. I had to consult the one and only walkthrough on the web, which told me to go to http://www.xineph.com/aze229d which actually contains the first puzzle you must solve.
The second is the nature of search on the web. The game was designed to give you fairly esoteric terms to search and have the correct website pop up in the top five results. Apparently enough people have searched the esoteric terms (including some fairly obscure proper names) that websites who game either MSN or Google to increase their hitcount have latched onto them. So the first page will be full of garbage links and maybe somewhere on page two or three you'll find the page you need. In some cases the pages are totally gone from the search results, even though the websites still exist. This makes the game quite an exercise in internet sleuthing, and I quite enjoyed finding answers to puzzles in places where I wasn't supposed to go (again according to the walthrough).
The third is that you get email from a number of fictional characters. As part of the fiction, I was paired up with another purchaser of the CD. She was a grad student working on her thesis on the Salem witch trials. I tried to get chatty with her, since I've been to Salem many times, but my email to her just bounced. So much for realism. Later I was introduced to a hacker friend of hers, who threw together some little applets that helped with some of the puzzles. My hacker buddy was so 133t that my ISP's spam filter automatically blocked anything from his address. Not to mention that my own spam filter routinely thought all the emails from the various characters were spam, I had a couple of weeks of looking through my spam bucket for hints and clues.
So the game cannot be played without a walkthrough. The shelf-life of Missing is greater than your average ARG, but it's still finite.
The walkthrough is pretty great, with hints instead of outright solutions, then links to outright solutions. It's really one of the best of its type I've seen on the web, so I was amazed when I got to the end and found this:
Wow. Who goes through crafting such a complete and helpful walkthrough for a game they hate? It's just one of the many mysteries of Missing.
In closing, the greatest pleasure I received from this game was ending it. It was frustrating, for the most part, exceedingly monotonous, and the constant interruptions of having to check for clues online makes one feel annoyed throughout the entire game. The ending of the game leaves room for a sequel to In Memoriam; hopefully, however, that will never happen. The ending of this game, after all of the hard work the player goes through to see what happens at the end is inexcusable I feel. After all of the build-up and torment (playing this game), it is as if the developers hand you a a piece of garbage and say: "Here, this is for your efforts." The on-scene locations, via video clips, were nice to watch although each were very brief. The graphics were nice, and the story keeps the player interested enough to want to see what happens at the end. Aside from the aforementioned good points of the game, everything else is awful. I'd recommend reading through my walkthrough (e-mails, messages from the Phoenix, spoilers, etc) for an almost complete understanding of the game. Without playing the game, and merely reading this walkthrough, you will just miss out on the frustration and annoyances of the gameplay, and the several mini-videos throughout. Ultimately, you aren't missing much in my opinion.
He is right, the ending of Missing is a slap in the face. The last two puzzles aren't puzzles at all, they're twitch games. You have to first complete a Pac-man clone, then battle your way through a top down shooter. It was as though the author (and it is a single author) thought, "Gee, what's the hardest thing I can make an adventure gamer do? I know! I'll have them complete classic arcade games!"
SPOILERS AHEAD
Once you jump through those hoops, you have to play the killer himself in a strategy game that he's made. If you lose, a bomb will go off and kill the journalist and his girlfriend. Nice stakes, and it was a decent game, but after a couple of turns, your hacker friend breaks in and tells you that he's about to locate our heroes based on the signal from this game (or some such gobbledygook), and that you should keep the killer on the line as long as possible. Well, it's a turn based strategy game, so I took a really long time trying to decide my next move. Did the killer complain? Nope, he waited patiently. Of course, I could have left the darn thing sitting there all night if I wanted, because it was a set number of moves before the hacker broke in again and told me that he'd found them and that the police were on their way! Woot! End of game.
Really.
But see, I was kicking the killer's ass. I was going to win, and I never got the chance to best him.
Then a half hour later my friend the Italian detective sends an email (apparently texting from his phone) that he's at the place and it's dark and creepy. Then a couple of hours later I get an email that says they're safe, the a sometime after that I get an email with a link to a video of the girlfriend thanking me for saving her. The video is shitty, and where's the guy?
On the one hand, the way the game is set up dictates that this is how it must end, because suddenly we're not dealing with the carefully crafted puzzles of the killer, we're trying to get people out of a warehouse, and everybody doesn't have video cameras strapped to their night-vision goggles. When they get the victims back to the police station, they're not worried about the schmoe at the computer who helped find them, they just want a cup of coffee and a blanket. So there is a bit of verisimilitude in the anticlimactic ending. On the other hand, in a game that lived or died on it's presentation and style, this was just not cool in any way. I think they ran out of money.
END SPOILERS
And you'd think that after all this bitching it's clear that this is a bad game, but it's not. It's a great premise, it exudes style, the puzzles are great, I learned stuff about European landmarks, the sound design was amazing, the films told a great story, and the lead actress was incredibly hot.
I would do it all over again. And I will, in Evidence.
The best part? Two weeks after I finished the game, long after I stopped thinking about it, I got an email from the killer.
He's still out there.
It was all part of his plan.
And he knows who I am.
