Collection Sally Face

Sally Face is a five-episode adventure game about a boy with a prosthetic face who moves into an apartment building where people keep dying. Steve Gabry made most of it alone, and the handmade quality is part of why it lands.

The mask is the hook and the misdirection. Sal wears it because of an injury, and the game lets you assume things about him for a long time before it explains anything. What you find out reframes the whole story, which is the sort of trick a game with this small a budget shouldn't be able to pull off.

The pixel art is deliberately awkward - flat, slightly stiff, with faces that don't emote much - and that stillness makes the horror sequences work. When something does move, it matters.

Larry's friendship with Sal is the warm centre of it, and the game is genuinely good on the subject of teenagers keeping each other alive.

This collection covers Sal, Larry and the game's iconography. Play it in order, and in the dark.