3/5 ★ – DavidSlack1105's review of Sally Face.

Sally Face was a game that I knew about for a while and I started it a few years ago, getting the first two episodes done before dropping it for some reason that I can't remember now, and it's been sitting in my backlog ever since but I wanted to try and finish it and so I did. I'm feeling quite mixed on the game because while I initially really enjoyed the first few episodes, the first 3 to be exact, the plot and lore seemed to go a bit off the deep end in the final two episodes, particularly the finale which is a huge shame because up until that point, the lore and the plot had been what was the most interesting to me. However, by Episode 5 in particular, it felt sort of all over the place with new lore drops and plot points being added in for the sake of convenience so as to get to a rushed ending. It felt like things were happening because they needed to and rather than having spread out all of this important cult backstory, it was crammed into mainly the final episode of the game and soon afterwards the cult is defeated and so there's not really time to digest anything about the backstory before the game is over. And it's not that this lore is really given to you, you have to hunt it down which isn't a bad thing if it was little pieces of backstory but if you decide to avoid reading the notes scattered around Episode 5, or couldn't find them, it's a good chance you won't know much about the cult's origins which is pretty crucial. I also didn't love the ending, not only for how rushed and convenient it felt for the main characters but also because other side characters such as Neil and Maple were just killed off and disregarded without even being acknowledged in the scene. Plus I've seen how people have criticised the game's handling of its characters of colour and the fact that this cult's backstory being that it was started by a stereotypical depiction of a Native American tribe and I would say that those criticisms are understandable because it doesn't feel like there was a reason behind it or a point made, rather that this was just the easier path to take. It's a shame because I did really like the first few episodes, especially for its cast of characters and its darker, horror tone as it felt like a good amount of time was being given to both so that they could grow on the audience, as they did for me. Not everything about the final episode was a miss though, as I did like the art style for some of the sequences in the Episode 5 as it felt like a lot of time and care went into them and it helped them standout pretty well. Overall, Sally Face started out quite strong with how it stuck to it's horror tone as well as also making its characters become endearing to us such as Sally, Larry, Lisa, and Ashley as well as some of the smaller side characters like Robert. But the time management that was strong in the earlier episodes sort of lost its way near the end with very important lore exposition being dropped only in the final episode that only really served to make the narrative more confusing and the ending rushed. I'm not really sure where the story can go from here but it did say to be continued so I guess we'll have to wait and see?