A Girls Fabric Face is a game which does not know that it needs an apostrophe in that title. That right there should have been a warning to me. The incredibly generic screen shots on the Steam page should have been my next warning. I got suckered in by the positive reviews though and decided to check this game out. It was not a good decision.
“A Girls Fabric Face” is not terribly clear on its own story. Or at least, it doesn’t ever really let the player in on it. The Steam page says that you’re investigating a brutal murder, but the game itself never actually says that, instead relying on the player to already have read the Steam description. However, the Steam description also cuts off mid-sentence. There’s a longer description in the “about this game” section of the page, but it’s a different description (whose information is also never conveyed within the game itself) so we never find out what exactly the rest of that sentence is supposed to be. So how’s the story? I don’t know. You’re on your own with this one.
This is an incredibly ugly game. It seems to insist entirely of stock Unity assets just kind of thrown haphazardly together. It takes place in what it claims is an abandoned house, but it looks like someone went and stripped all the drywall off, so you just have a bunch of 2x4s separating the rooms. Despite that, the crowbar you find can only pry off certain boards in the house that the game wants you to take off. There are also a lot of smiley faces which I think the game developer intended to be creepy, but it just comes across as silly.
“Fabric Face” contains sound design best summed up as “annoying.” The music is essentially non-existent. The sound-effects are repetitive and generic. There’s plenty of giggling children, crying, creaking doors, all of that fun stuff. I hope you like hearing those same few sounds played again and again with no discernible source. Of course, all of that pales in comparison to the battery charger. You’re going to have to use that thing constantly in order to recharge your flashlight, but the sound-effect is absolutely grating. The voice-acting isn’t too bad, so there’s that I suppose.
The gameplay is just the absolute worst kind of lazy. There’s a lot of aimless wandering around the house where you’re looking for things that have changed, including one point at which you’re looking for things that are different from how they were when the character last visited the house, which took place before the game started. So you have no way of knowing what has changed. Other than the wandering, there really isn’t much to this game other than just finding keys and making sure your flashlight battery doesn’t run out.
None of these problems is really exceptionally terrible on its own. There are plenty of annoyances, sure, but no huge glaring flaws. So there are definitely worse games out there than “A Girls Fabric Face,” but that’s really not saying very much. At the same time, it’s really the best thing that I can say about the game. It’s not that this game is terrible, it’s just that there’s nothing there.
