Video game review: Sally Face

Hey there folks, looks like it’s time for another video game review because... WOW, I really need to shout about this one to the world.

Tiny bit of background first: I had actually never heard of Sally Face before, as far as I remember, although I LOVE point-and-click adventures (which this is), and obviously have a very special place in my heart for blue-haired, mask-wearing, disfigured musicians. That’s actually HOW I learned of this game, when my good friend and fellow writer Adam Wing (his books are amazing, please check them out here!) @-ed me in an RT of a gorgeous drawing of a blue-haired guitarist that looked almost, but not quite, like my Rei. (I’m not sure if the artist would be cool with me screenshotting the tweet, so please check it out here.) And it was hashtagged #SallyFace.

 

So of course I clicked the hashtag, because I had to find out who this character was... and the game he was from sounded EXACTLY LIKE MY THING.

 

(By the way, if you somehow found this blog because you’re a fan of Sally Face and would like to increase the number of blue-haired, mask-wearing, disfigured musicians in your fandom repertoire, requisite link to my book here.)

 

So. I’m glad this is just my blog and not some Official Review Site where I have to give a star rating, because my overall take is this: I have some somewhat major gripes with the gameplay, but the characters and atmosphere were SO SO SO INCREDIBLY AMAZING THAT I DO NOT EVEN CARE.

 

You play (mostly) as Sal Fisher, aka Sally Face, “a boy with a prosthetic face and a tragic past” who is moving with his father to a... rather unique apartment building. Unfortunately, right before you moved in... a murder happened to have occurred in the next room over. The first of five “episodes” is mostly devoted to solving that murder, but things quickly take a paranormal turn, and the game becomes much more twisted (both as in dark and as in convoluted) and genre-defying from there.

 

Both the art style and the episodic format were inspired by 90s/early 2000s NickToons like Ren and Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life... each episode is fairly short (depending on how many side quests you do, you can probably complete each in 30-60 minutes, similar to a TV show). The first two episodes feel fairly similar to one another, but from episode 3 the settings and gameplay get shaken up a bit the further you progress, giving each a really unique flavor and tone. (Episode 3 is probably my favorite just because it’s the happiest... which may seem weird coming from someone who loves angst as much as I do, but I really really like it when characters get a nice little respite in the middle of all the angst... this game is definitely dark, but it does a good job of balancing that darkness with some great found family-style happiness and light humor).

 

It is billed as a horror game... which is POSSIBLY the reason I don’t remember hearing about it before. I may have passed over it in a list of adventure games for that very reason? But it’s definitely not, like, Resident Evil-style horror. And it’s not REALLY gory, like (excuse me, showing my age here) something like Phantasmagoria (which I enjoyed, but it definitely gave me some nightmares). There are some horror ELEMENTS, but I’d call it more paranormal in general. And as mentioned before, shows like Ren and Stimpy were an inspiration for the art, so there are some not-so-pleasant close-ups of corpses and things. There’s ONE scene that I’d call a jump scare... most of the other disturbing things you can kind of see coming and brace yourself for? Like, if you peek into the back of the coroner’s van after a grisly murder, well, you’re not really expecting something pleasant, are you? I personally found the art less disturbing than Ren and Stimpy, although YMMV. (I’ll add a probably-incomplete list of content warnings at the end of this review, BTW, if you’re concerned.)

 

As far as the gameplay itself, it starts out fairly straightforward. The bulk of the game is two-dimensional, so you can only walk left or right. Items you can interact with MOSTLY pop up either as a name (“Sal’s Room” over your bedroom door, “TV” over the TV etc.) or as “???”, but sometimes they don’t, and you need to randomly interact with things that seemed to be part of the background. This was one of the things that frustrated me at first because I felt like it wasn’t really established that you COULD interact with unlabelled things, and it wasn’t just for side quests and achievements... you need to do it to complete the main plot of Episode 2, but in Episode 1 you could do everything with only labelled objects, so that felt a little... inorganic, I guess?

 

I did like the fact that you can’t usually die, and in the few segments where you CAN, you do get to start right back at the start of that sequence and try again. None of that (REALLLLLLLY showing my age now) Space Quest-era “You got eaten by a giant space spider, say goodbye to the past three hours of progress” stuff. I do like adventure games where you can’t really die, so that was nice.

 

It was, however, REALLY INSANELY INFURIATINGLY FRUSTRATING that MAJOR PLOT POINTS are hidden in optional storylines and side quests. And the game doesn’t seem to remember which side quests you did, so you’ll find yourself in episode 4 talking about something that COULD have happened in Episode 3 if you’d done the side quest, but that you didn’t actually see because you missed it. Especially since this is SUCH a character-intensive story, I would’ve really appreciated it if the game was set up so that you couldn’t progress until you’d completed all of the puzzles that lead to essential pieces of the main plot, at the very least. I ended up watching a lot of it on YouTube, but it would have been nice to get it in order, within the game.

 

I did LOVE the characters and the story though, even if I had to turn to streamers to get large chunks of it. Sal is an amazing, complicated protagonist... he’s already seen a lot of tragedy at the start of the story, and that just builds and builds as things go on. This game does deal with some mental health issues, and it does so in a way that I found sensitive and realistic. But Sal is also unflinchingly kind, as optimistic as you could expect, and owns both his face and his gender-nonconforming pigtails with a confidence that’s genuinely admirable. All of the teens in his friend group, as well, are accepting and loyal to one another—its really a great little found family group, and I absolutely see why these characters inspire so many fanworks.

 

As far as representation goes, most if it is casual but positive? There are characters of color, there are disabled characters (including, but not only, Sal), there are gay characters, but none of that is really an issue? They’re just a part of the cast of characters. Other than Sal handling a few non-malicious but tone-deaf comments about his face with the confidence described above, mostly in the first episode when he’s meeting everyone for the first time, there’s really nothing but acceptance. There’s one scene in Episode 4 (which is in general the most shatteringly sad one) that just... makes my heart hurt. But that would be a spoiler. ;)

 

A lot of this game is just really profoundly sad... but the sadness and the darkness feels RIGHT in the context of the story. I loved it a lot, and hope with all my heart that that “To be continued...” at the end comes true. <3

 

Finally, the content warnings... as I’ve said, I feel that most of this was handled with amazing sensitivity, and even a couple of things that often bother ME in fiction felt... sad, but appropriately handled within the context of the story, here. This is by no means an exhaustive list, as the triggers that I personally have and that I am aware of others having do not represent all possible triggers that anyone could have.

 

CONTENT WARNINGS: death, murder, suicide, depression, death of a child, death of a parent, cartoon gore, body horror, eyes, teeth, filth (dirty bathrooms, diapers, etc.), medical stuff, alcoholism, recreational marijuana use, cults

 

Details on the “eyes” and “teeth” stuff, because these are OFTEN triggering for me but weren’t too bad here: One puzzle involves loose (as in, outside of the mouth) teeth. We do not know whose teeth they are, no actual tooth-related trauma is shown, they are just teeth. However, they are realistically drawn. The eye stuff... Sal has a prosthetic eye, however, again, no graphic trauma is actually shown. We see how it happened, but... not in detail, and we actually never see his full face without the mask. There are glass eyes sitting on top of his dresser in one scene. There is a random disembodied eye in at least one scene that isn’t very realistic-looking and definitely not gory (not sure if it’s supposed to be a real eye or a prosthetic or what). A couple of mini games involve shooting monsters in the eye, but again not gory, kind of Super Nintendo-level graphics with no blood or gore. A couple of characters end up with like... demonic or super-powered eyes at some point, but again, nothing that really bothered me and I’m typically pretty sensitive to eye stuff. Everything was either fantasy-based enough, or, on the other hand, actual-medical-device based enough that it didn’t bother me.

 

OVERALL RATING: OMFG AMAZING GIVE ME PART 6 NOW.