im going to cry

hate bologna, love this game

Honestly, I'm surprised that this game is rated so highly. I have mixed feelings about it at best. I mean, the first part was rather good and I really liked it. But the rest? - that was a total disappointement to say the least. But let's start with a brief recap.

Positive:
- thrilling story (the first part);
- enigmatic atmosphere;
- cool art design;
- great BGM.

Negative:
- rushed and senseless second part of the story;
- poor variety and quality of puzzles/mini-games;
- criminally much backtracking;
- clunky gameplay mechanics (mostly in the second part)

Ok, now the full version. Let's start with the story. As I already said, the first part was very thrilling. It starts as an intriguing psychological horror. You see that tag above, right? Well, turns out that's a lie - in few chapters the game switches to ghost murder story. It left slightly bitter aftertaste, but nothing critical at that moment. We still had good detective story (as it seemed) with some mystery, interesting characters, subplots and so on. Your actions also have some consequences and you can even slightly affect the story.

The problems start after the 3rd episode, when you eventually discover that all this was just about cosmic horror and that's it. Thus, all previous story just gets thrown out the window, since you get one cheap answer to all questions. The main mystery of the game (why Sally did what he did) reveals us very anticlimactic truth, which eventually leads to nowhere and all was for nothing. One of the key characters out of blue decides to commint a suicide (lol). It was so unexpected and so stupid that the game can't even give you a reasonable explanation why he did so.

We get much fewer dialogs and overall interactions with other characters. Instead, the game forces you to read notes with walls of text. Also, most of the time you'll play as secondary characters. But my 'favourite' part was at the end, when you, as a group of secondary characters, have to fight against another group of random baddies. I really could not care less. The main villain is just a random dude we never met before, who dies like a loser after dropping one line of text, and you get 'friendship is magic' type of ending.

Now few words about gameplay. I won't go in circles - it just sucks. And yes, the first reason is backtracking. Look at my playtime - probably 2/3 of this time was wasted wandering back and forth just to activate another piece of dialog, find one tiny item or check if something new happened. I kinda could tolerate this in the first part of the game, while story still was interesting enough, but in the second part it becomes ridiculous. For example, in the 4th chapter you to have check every corner of multi-storey house, just to find 1 tiny object per storey. No joke.

The same problem with local puzzles. The most common puzzle here is to guess few right doors in a row. How you achiev this? By trial and error principle of course! Guessed right order? - very well! No? - start from the very beginning. And again, you don't just choose door - you have to do some walking. Very time consuming. You can also see a pic with a Gearboy above. It allows you to play some primitive 2D games with quite unresponsive controls. Not fun at all.

At the last chapter gameplay turns into total mess. The game just throws into your face bunch of cheap browser games, with mixed visuals (some of them look nice, but most of them - no) and tons of QTE. The game turns into some primitive... slasher? beat em up? Ah, yeah, don't forget about walking.

Let's make some conclusions. Sally Face has some cool things, like visuals, music, atmosphere, characters... It has missable content, your choices have some consequences and thus - the game can offer some replay value. I unlocked nearly 70-80% content in each chapter in my first walkthrough. And honestly, I would not mind to play it again just to see what I missed.

But when I think about all those tedious and repetitive puzzles, and the amount of backtracking I'll have to do again... No. Just no. The story is not that cool, as it initially seemed, to justify such gameplay. It wasn't fun on the first try, so replaying it any time soon would be unbearable.