Face You Less

About Face You Less

Face You Less is a very short visual novel by Alz (axlelism), made with Ren'Py for O2A2 2023, a micro visual novel jam with strict limits on assets: one illustration, one character sprite and about a thousand words. It plays in the browser on itch.io and downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux, free.

It is night, and someone is in bed with you. You must figure out who, and whether you will accept them in your life. The single sprite is a face on the pillow beside you, and the game makes that one rule into its horror: the face warps and melts, its features running into each other and turning into people from your past, while you lie there and the voices will not stop.

You read, click and choose, in grainy black and white with a single eerie track. The maker warns of possibly disturbing imagery and derealization, and has said the face-warping began as an idea about face blindness and became a metaphor for something else in the rewrite.

It takes 5 to 10 minutes and has two endings, one bleak and one hopeful; the maker links a guide to reaching both. Players call it creepy, tense and spooky, and several say it spoke to their own anxiety or derealization. It suits players who want a few minutes of quiet, unsettling horror.

How to play Face You Less

1. Open the game's itch.io page and play it in the browser, or download it for Windows, Mac or Linux.
2. Read the text and click to move on.
3. Make your choices as you try to work out who is in the bed.
4. Play again with your choices in a different order for the other ending.

Tips

• Play at night with headphones; the single soundtrack carries much of the mood.
• If you only get one ending, the maker's guide on the page explains the order of choices for the other.
• It is about 1,000 words, so read slowly and look at the face between lines.

Questions