Don’t Face Up is an indie horror game/”creepy death stare” simulator developed by tesakiza, a Japanese developer whom I know nothing about as they don’t seem to have an Itch.io account or any sort of previous experience beforehand other than posting something about their later game “Blind Bullet” on Twitter. My experience with the game is one I’m also not totally sure about, having probably just picked it up after seeing it on Steam socials or through TVTropes or something of that kind. However I’ve been streaming free/cheap indie horror games for buddies of mine on Wednesday and Saturday Nights in anticipation for Halloween coming up here and along with the likes of The Shore and Narrow Woods Hotel, I ended up playing through this game first. Having beaten it in around eighty or so minutes, here’s my take on Don’t Face Up.
The plot of Don’t Face Up has you wake up in a room with the words “Don’t Face Up” drawn on the floor. Doing so will lead to a bit of a jump scare and listening to a nearby audio log will have you listening to [spoiler]an office romance between “The Director” and “The Deputy”. A phone call ringing nearby will again warn you not to “look into its eyes” and chat logs will speak of “reading the manual” and “not looking in something’s eyes”.[/spoiler] This is when you start witnessing all black humanoid shadow creatures who pop in and out of environments around the map, so of course it’s probably about that, right? The whole goal for the protagonist, whose name we still don’t know about, is to get out of the building as soon as possible and to do that the protagonist has to solve puzzles to get keycards to leave. From here I’ll get into the rest of the plot in the next spoiler section, but here is where I’m going to get into the actual gameplay section: you solve puzzles and try not to look up at all of course as you go from room to room, with each puzzle getting harder in difficulty. Most of the puzzles are fine and make some sort of sense continuity wise, but there were a couple of times where I had to look up a guide to really figure some stuff out (ex. One puzzle has you count the number of chairs in each room, each number forms part of a code. Which part? Who knows, but also don’t forget that some chairs are stacked into each other too). I feel like the rest of the actual gameplay gets kind of frustrating when they introduce [spoiler]“the scientist” with the weird glasses who patrols the halls and will keep you locked in a room nearby if he catches you.[/spoiler] That being said, the main way to avoid him is to wait until he does his patrols, listen as he walks away and then dash to whatever room you’re looking to go to before rinsing and repeating. For normal enemies, you look at them and you have the ability to try to run away before they grab you and kill you, though this usually involves running into a nearby room and shutting the door behind you. There’s a section or two that are more linear in this case in terms of avoiding death, but they have checkpoints placed right in front so I didn’t really sweat this too much. Otherwise I didn’t feel like I had much to say on the gameplay end other than it’s cool despite some confusing sequences and puzzles, it’s not like the layouts are really crazy as it’s just multiple floors with one hallway forward and they allow you to save after beating each floor.
Spoilers: https://backloggd.com/u/gamemast15r/review/3512430/
How do I feel about this plot? Other than some possible misconstruances on my end, it’s not a bad plot at all. If anything for some reason it gives me old Galerians or Parasite Eve 2 vibes. I’m pretty chill with this, though admittedly I wish it would’ve been explained better than in a fanpack that you can buy for four dollars or a Patreon donation as there were bits and pieces of the game that I got confused on, even if I followed along with the basic plot. Otherwise it’s fine, solid, no complaints. How about the art design and atmosphere? At first I was iffy on the actual art design itself, with a lot of it being bland, grey and oddly smooth, something that one could mistake for an asset flip somewhere. However I feel like it sort of adds to the flavor of the game now, between the total darkness and the drab office atmosphere, it lends itself pretty well to avoiding enemies lurking in the dark. The enemies themselves are mostly just shadow figures, though once you look at them they have a singular eye and it gets all trippy and then they attempt to charge and kill you. The actual honest to god creepiest part about this game is [spoiler]013, who I swear looks like Dr. Robotnik with freaky glasses, seemingly one eye and a smile that screams “s e x offender” but considering his character I wanted to avoid him like the plague. Merciful Mother herself is a floating shadow baby that in my mind for some reason looked and felt like a Cacodemon even if I was wrong later on.[/spoiler] Finally the audio design: whilst there’s no music or voice acting, the actual noises in the game add to the intensity of the atmosphere with every door creak, every Sadako-like scream coming from the creatures when they see you. It’s a really solid game in these regards and gave me a few creeps, though if people don’t care for the graphics themselves I would understand.
Don’t Face Up was a game I came out of feeling mixed to positive about in a way. I didn’t come out absolutely hating it or thinking that it wasn’t worth anything in terms of value, in fact it has a lot of cool ideas, I guess I just came out of that really confused about the presentation. The plot felt kind of all over the place, filled with supplemental material that gives context on tesakiza’s Patreon and gameplay that while it succeeded in its goal of providing a tense experience did get kind of tiresome on certain occasions. At first I was a bit mixed on the graphics thinking that it felt like a cheap asset flip, before I eventually kind of embraced it as a part of this game’s strange visual identity. The audio design on the other hand helped enhance the creepy atmosphere a decent bit without the addition of voice acting and music. Would I ever play this game again? No not particularly, but I see sprinkles of something really special here that could be expanded upon in further games. Speaking of further games, the only bit of info I could find on the developer and what happened after the release of Don’t Face Up was that they would release a game called Blind Bullet, a 2D top down shooter game that may or may not take place in the same universe? I’m unsure, but if you’re looking for a recommendation on if to play this game for spooky month? Sure, I mean it’s free so I don’t see why not. That being said, keep an open mind and just know that some parts might drag a tiny bit despite the cool concepts.
Links:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2425320/Blind_Bullet/
https://x.com/tesakiza
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2816150/DONT_FACE_UP_FanPack/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DontFaceUp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CFzd5A4SGo (Longplay)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3155915029
