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, then on Nintendo Switch (2021), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (2022) and, in 2026, on iPhone, iPad and Android. On Steam the first episode is sold as the base game and a season pass adds Episodes Two to Five and the soundtrack; on the other stores it is sold whole.

The game follows Sal Fisher, a teenager with a prosthetic face, who moves with his father into the Addison Apartments in the small town of Nockfell, where a string of murders has shaken the town. 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. The story is told in flashbacks, as an older Sal recounts it to a psychiatrist.

You play it as a 2D point-and-click adventure seen from the side: 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. Some puzzles ask you to find parts to upgrade the Gear Boy itself. Short action scenes and minigames break things up,. The art is scratchy and hand-drawn in the style of 1990s cartoons, which makes the bloody crime scenes, dream sequences and ghostly appearances more unsettling. Dream sequences also fill in Sal's past between investigations.

Against other hand-drawn horror adventures it leans less on chases and more on a long mystery with recurring friends, the town's lore and grim humour. A full run takes around nine hours across the five episodes, so it suits players who like story-heavy mystery horror to play an episode a night. It is rated Mature by the ESRB and 16 by PEGI for violence, gore and strong language.

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.
• Not every object you can use shows a prompt when you walk past. When stuck, try interacting with things in the room that look ordinary, such as a radio.
• The optional puzzles are hard but hold some of the story's most important pieces.
• On Steam, buy the season pass with the first episode: it adds Episodes Two to Five.

Questions