Sally Face

About Sally Face

Sally Face is a horror adventure made almost entirely by one person, Steve Gabry, working as Portable Moose, who did the art, design and music. It came out in five episodes between 2016 and 2019 on PC, Mac and Linux, and later on Nintendo Switch (2021), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (2022) and phones. On Steam the first episode is sold as the base game and the other four come in a season pass; elsewhere it is sold whole.

The game follows Sal Fisher, a teenager with a prosthetic face, who moves into an apartment block in the small town of Nockfell. Strange things have been happening there, including murders, and Sal soon finds that his handheld game console, the Gear Boy, lets him pick up the voices of the dead. With his friends, he starts to pull at the town's secrets.

You play it as a 2D point-and-click adventure: walk through rooms, search for objects, talk to the eccentric neighbours and solve puzzles, some of them optional and difficult, that open new parts of the story. Short action scenes and mini-games break things up. The art is scratchy and hand-drawn in the style of 1990s cartoons, which makes the bloody crime scenes and ghostly appearances more unsettling.

It suits players who like story-heavy mystery horror with recurring characters and lore to dig into, more than chases and survival.

How to play Sally Face

1. Explore the Addison Apartments and later the town, clicking on objects and people to examine and talk.
2. Collect items and use them to solve puzzles that open the way forward.
3. Use the Gear Boy when it reacts to find and speak with ghosts.
4. Try the optional puzzles in each episode; they reveal extra parts of the story.

Tips

• Talk to every neighbour more than once; their lines change as the story goes on.
• The optional puzzles are hard but hold some of the story's most important pieces.
• On Steam, the season pass adds Episodes Two to Five to the first episode.

Questions