A missing friend whose face becomes more blurry as each day passes, Face of Another pulls you into a glitchy world where you must figure out what happened to her before it happens to you too.
Face of Another isn’t an adaptation of the 1986 film with the same title. Rather, it’s an indie horror title with a clear message: social media can be extremely harmful. While this is something we are all very much aware of, I feel this game executes the dark side of the internet and our obsession with comparing ourselves to others better than Silent Hill: A Short Message.
Here is our explanation of the Face of Another game, diving into its story and what both endings mean for Emma.
Content warning for dark themes: self-harm and suicide.
Table of contents
Face of Another story, explained
Face of Another has a strange and ominous start that quickly sets a foreboding tone. Knowing off the bat that Emma’s friend has been missing for the last three days, yet she cannot remember her face without checking her phone’s lock screen, is rather worrying. How could you forget a friend’s face so quickly? While Emma works on her school assignment, she’s distracted by her laptop running out of charge and the shower running by itself.
The distinct sound of a camera flash appears in front of her as she investigates the bathroom. Someone’s messing with her. She’s forcibly removed from reality through a malware attack disguised as a slot machine game on her laptop, showing the unsolicited bathroom picture that was just taken without Emma’s consent. This would later become a full circle moment for Emma as she’s brought into a glitchy digital realm where she must rely on her camera phone to pave the way forward.
Emma has to navigate across this digital world while being actively pursued, toyed with, and tricked by an entity that masquerades as others. Similar to Junji Ito’s The Face Burglar, Face of Another has a trickster of a villain who steals the faces of others—presumably to fit in. It’s much like how social media fuels jealousy and competitiveness, where we pretend to be better off than we actually are, just to enforce a higher status or greater importance than our peers. We—like the entity Emma’s fleeing from—are a projection of those we copy and want to so desperately be. Even when we’re captured by the entity, our face is added onto Sarah’s, clearly labeling us as two-faced.
“Technology distorts reality,” as written on the Steam product page, showcasing that what we see online isn’t real life. Social media can contribute to declining mental health, especially if you’re a victim of cyberbullying. This was the case for Mia. The places we visit aren’t of Emma’s memories, but rather of Mia’s. We look at pieces of her suicide note, explaining her dark thoughts of wanting nothing more than to disappear. She was only a kid. The fact that Emma is writing up a school assignment about social media at the start tells us that Sarah’s disappearance didn’t happen too long after Mia’s death.
The reveal is that Emma and Sarah took pictures of Mia following an accident at school, where she wasn’t allowed to go to the restroom. The camera flashes, taking three pictures of Emma trying to cover her face as she’s trapped in the stall, unable to retaliate against the bullies. It’s implicitly suggested that Emma took her own life following the bullying. She feared the images would spread like wildfire, making it impossibly hard for Mia to continue as if nothing happened. Instead of fearing the entity chasing us, our attention switches to judgment and betrayal as we were looking for—and playing as—pathetic bullies.
Consumed by the darkness of media, Mia chose to leave the world, opting to go into the phone screen instead. It could be viewed that we are running from our guilt and the twisted version of Mia that we forced on her. It’s unlikely anything we’ve seen is real, but if it is, then Mia was lured by the faceless entity, which consumed and posed as her, choosing Emma and Sarah as its next victims. The entity takes the form of Mia, wearing the same clothes as seen in the toilet stall pictures. Alternatively, the entity could be Mia, whose reality has been completely distorted, where she became a vengeful spirit who desires to be anyone but herself.
Face of Another endings, explained
There are two endings in Face of Another, determined by your first and only choice in the game that arrives at the finale. After warding off the evil and finding Mia submerged in a bathtub full of a black substance, we can either sever the ties to those photographs or leave them alone. We believe this symbolizes the act of deleting the photos and letting Mia move on, or leaving them up, and maybe even posting them online.
Ending one (Bad)
Emma will become part of the glitchy world she was trying to leave if you choose to take a photo of Mia without pulling the wires to the pictures of her helplessly trying to cover herself in the toilet stall. This is her punishment. She disappears into the ether, much like Sarah did. Her face, her entire image vanishes from existence. The game promises no one will remember her—a fate that many would fear.
This is exactly what happened to Sarah, who was taken in front of her laptop by the entity consuming her essence and stealing her face. The entity purposely left remnants of Sarah behind through the blurred images on Emma’s phone, luring Emma in so that she’d suffer the same fate. If we look at it from the psychological horror perspective, her disappearance alongside Sarah could mean they’ve succumbed to their guilt and followed in Mia’s footsteps—”into the screen.”
Ending two (Good)
The better ending for Emma is to escape the world after severing the wires between Mia and those stall photos. We believe this means the pictures were deleted; however, it appears that the damage is already done. For this is a psychological horror, we can only assume the digital world doesn’t actually exist in this form and that this was the guilt manifested in Emma and Sarah following Mia’s death. I suppose deleting the images would more so act as a way for Mia to find peace, and that the girls didn’t post the images after all, but the overwhelming and suffocating fear that they might is what killed Mia.
Emma wakes to the sound of her phone ringing. It’s Sarah. The conclusion is rather ambiguous, for the last call we got from her was the entity’s creepy message: “Oh, how nice it must feel…to wear your skin.” But we believe Sarah’s phone call at the end means they’ve moved on, grown as people, and know never to humiliate a person again, for the repercussions are too severe, and you can never truly take it back.
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