Missing
 

The truth is that I rarely finish amateur/indie games I downloaded. Just about everything from Yahtzee is a safe bet, yet.. Ok, yesterday night I decided to give "Missing" a shot, a game I had downloaded a couple of months ago already. I ended up finishing it in one two and a half hours sitting. Nights are made for games like this. :D

Don't expect many puzzly puzzles stuff, but there's a storyline in there that keeps you guessing until the very end and heads into a more disturbing direction than what the game fools you to believe it would lead to in the early parts. Gee, I hope that wasn't a spoiler? Pretty good use of sound, by the way. No random_MIDI_tunes you often get to hear in creations like this.

In short, it isn't epic, it isn't a landmark achievement in the history of video gaming, but it's an amateur adventure game™ I actually finished, and I think that might count for something. :P

I started it twice (once with a walkthrough) but couldn't get into it.
I think it's the navigation that ruined it for me. I kept getting lost, not knowing where I was or where I need to go.

Also, I'm not sure, but I think you could only save in the starting room, which made things a little worse.

Yeah, navigating can be a tricky, especially since from the visual representation it's not always clear in which way you're actually going. Normally games using a similar kind of navigation let you face in all four directions on each node, whereas it's not the case in "Missing". I think it's a lot like the old Icom games, think "Uninvited". Certainly something that saves resources (imagine having to draw four bitmaps for each node and each direction instead of only one). But I agree.

Saving games wasn't much of an issue at all, though.You can only save the game inside the player character's room. Since it's a rather tight game, meaning that there really isn't all that much backtracking involved since the whole events take place inside an inn and its nearby surroundings, it didn't bother me at all. Plus, you never actually die (

Spoiler:

Yeah, yeah, I know, not true.. :P

), no matter how nasty things get, so I never felt like going back to that room just to save the game after each tiny little bit of progress. :D

You'll eventually do backtracking anyway, the place has quite some rooms to explore, and sometimes the animations of doors opening and staircases climbed, which both are unskippable can be a bit of an annoyance, though.