Hidetaka Suehiro’s (SWERY) game, The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (The Missing) (2018) presents an LGBTQ narrative by initially misdirecting the player with an implied, and quite different, LGBTQ narrative. The game is designed to suggest that the player character’s narrative goal is to seek out another (non-player) character who, it is implied by careful use of metaphor and mechanics, is the player-character’s lesbian romantic partner. This careful construction of game design obscures an eventual reveal that the narrative was rather the dreamlike experience of a transgender (trans) woman’s near-death exploration of her own identity, experience, and trauma. I present an autoethnographic close-reading of the game’s intersectional design features in order to demonstrate how it does this, to consider why, and to examine its potential to achieve the designer’s stated goal; which is to teach the player empathy for trans people (SWERY, 2019). I show how the game’s design demonstrates an awareness of its wider sociocultural context – a context that the game designer is in turn trying to impact with the game. I will show how this context is leveraged, which tropes and conventions the game deploys and subverts, and what presumptions of the player the game relies on to make this misdirect function. I present my analysis of The Missing’s (2018) design misdirect as an “assemblage” (Taylor, 2009) of game elements combined with recognisable LGBTQ narrative conventions (Shaw & Friesem, 2016); all with the goal to provide a specific pedagogical moment, performed partially through this misdirect. I compare my findings to commentaries and reviews by others, presentations and interviews with the designer himself and to some of his other game designs that feature LGBTQ references and representations. I position this reading as an introduction to my wider research into how games might provide an opportunity for the exploration, expression and embodiment of trans subjectivities through videogame-based-learning.