This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
This is probably my favorite visual novel style game. It is a really short story about a girl living her life, doing work and chatting with a goth gf and learning more about your roommate. I loved the endings and I loved the content the game had in store, even though it was incredibly short.
Now for spoilers.
You learn that your roommate is suicidal either through talking to her or through getting an ending where she well... yeah. The game is incredibly bittersweet. I only got two endings and I believe there are three of them. The endings I got were the one were my roommate took her life which was me just fooling around with the mechanics, and the second ending I got was where my roommate moved away. In the first ending I was working on my laptop and receiving messages from someone with the name goth gf. She sent me memes and asked me to meet (she lived in the same building) and I agreed. As I was leaving I stumbled upon my roommate which had remembered my birthday and the developer had been so kind to record a small sample of the birthday song. I made my leave to meet the goth gf but I had a weird feeling and held back and the date became... quite uncomfortable. After the date was over I turned on my phone and saw I had missed messages from my roommate, one of which saying "it's not your fault.". When I came home I saw the door to her room and a sign saying "don't come in, call the police. they will know what to do.". I decided to call the police and that was the end of the game.
In my second ending I kept playing the same until I heard my roommate fighting with her mom. After it got quiet I walked out and knocked on the door to see my roommate looking distressed. I asked her to hang out and there the rest of the day disappeared as I had a lengthy conversation with her about everything in life, while her will to live was a focus. We talked about her past and her twenty thousand word long Harry Potter fan fiction and her passion for writing. The conversation felt nice and realistic, and despite the conversation being entirely fiction it fell really close to home. The game ended, but my roommate was still alive. She moved away shortly after though, and she never took contact again but I feel that is just a consequence of maturing and she did probably not end her life after.
This game has received a lot of hate because of it's simplification of suicide and how the message it sends is wrong, but this game is the most realistic representation of suicide in any media. Once I was the one who hung up the sign on the door and sent the heartbreaking message of "it's not your fault.". If their phone was off I would be dead right now, and this game made me cry at one point. I loved Doki Doki Literature Club because of it's short scene of you having that discussion with Sayori, but the plotpoint of Monika forcing her to kill herself by writing in the files ruined the whole narrative. Missed Messages is one of a kind and I don't think anything will ever do it as good as this game did it. My only issue is that despite this game being very LGBTQ+ friendly with lesbian relationships and the rainbow and trans flag being apparent in your bedroom they make the reference to Harry Potter which is written by a trans exclusionary radical feminist, but I don't think that's enough to take a point off.… Expand