At TGS 2018, Archipel met up with Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro, who a moment to talk about The Missing, the very first project by his company White Owls since being founded in November 2016.
White Owls was founded on November 1, 2016 and The Missing was the company’s first project. After a discussion with Arc System Works’ president Minoru Kidooka about the start of his company, Swery brought in the project to ask if they could collaborate as a way to keep his promise to make games together.
Swery explains that they were reluctant to the idea at first due to how extreme the game was, but both Kidooka and and producer Toshimichi Mori understood that it was what they had to do in order to work on a Swery game.
He goes on to explain that The Missing has a very cruel game system that has the character mutilate or immolate herself in order to solve puzzles. In order to express it, Swery looked at creating the graphics as beautiful as possible, and with beautiful music to go with it, in order to have a sort of ambivalence going on. Otherwise, it would simply be just a cruel game.
So in order to fuse both of those elements of beauty and cruelty, Swery tried to create the most adequate universe possible, which ended up being what you see in the game’s current form. He also talked about what he calls “Sweryverse,” which means all of his games are connected somehow. That said, longtime fans of Swery’s game will probably be able to find those connections.
The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories launches today for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
