FMV games were a blight on the 90s. For every Tex Murphy game there was umpteen monstrosities unleashed upon the world that contained nothing but slumming actors hamming it up in front of a low budget green screen interspersed with some poorly animated shooting, flying or fighting sequences. A quarter century or so on from that dark time, FMV makes a brief comeback in the form of Missing: An Interactive Thriller. In many ways it’s very different from the FMV games of old, but in others, unfortunately, it’s all too similar.
The production quality is testament to how far camera technology has progressed since the 90s. The FMV is crisp and shot on location, giving the adventure of a kidnapped man trying to escape his Saw meets Escape Room meets Night Trap prison and the cop trying to find him before it’s too late a polished, grounded look. There’s some evident talent both in front of and behind the camera as well, with some decent hand held work, some nicely framed shots and actors who actually emote without hamming it up. The story also plays into the puzzle nature of the game rather than forcing game logic onto the scenario. A man wakes up in a room. His wrists are chained to the roof. “Play With Me” is written on the door. Each successive room he finds himself in contains another puzzle he has to contend with and often reminders that his wife and children miss him, hinting both at the stakes of the game and the fact that the man was probably not the best husband or father to begin with. Occasionally the game switches perspectives to the detective trying to find the missing man. He has to find clues as to what happened and lets the player know that this has happened before. Conceptually it all ties together quite well, with each section being well timed, switching from a tense prisoner scene to a slower, more contemplative police investigation scene.
Everything but the puzzling that is. The presentation of Missing is miles ahead of the 90s FMV games, as is the acting, concept and writing, but the puzzles are all but exact replicas of that dark age of adventure gaming. There are sliding block puzzles, find a word puzzles, puzzles where you have to make a thing look like the diagram you have for it and puzzles where you replace missing parts of machines by scavenging the screen to find said parts, a task sometimes made difficult by the fact that the backgrounds are dark and muddy, often obscuring objects an necessitating pixel hunting. There is little to n|o challenge outside of the ill-conceived QTE style snap decisions that are made, mostly towards the end of the first chapter but also during the introduction of the detective, when the player has a few seconds to click a prompt that allows the detective to drink coffee, presumably without spilling it or getting it in his eye.
There’s an abstract appeal to a modem take on FMV, but Missing isn’t the game to reignite the genre. Chapter 1 is short and lacks challenge - you can blow through it in around 45 minutes - and while it definitely looks good, it still plays like the adventure games of the past we’d rather leave locked in a secret room, preferably without clues on how to escape. DANIEL WILKS
The presentation is great but the actual gameplay is firmly rooted in the early 90s.