Summer of Screams: Salad Fingers Where's May Gone Act 1

Salad Fingers Where's May Gone - Act 1
Point and Click Adventure
1 Player
System: PC
Developer: Geg Games
Year of Release: 2015
Available Here

Salad Fingers is an incredibly odd phenomenon. My group of friend stumbled upon in him back in early high school, and it's quirky style was right up our mostly demented alley. David Firth is the man behind Salad Fingers, and while Salad Fingers and his lust for rust is thoroughly entertaining, he has done some other really great, creepy, off the wall short cartoons that I truly adore. You can find it all on his website, Fat-Pie. Sadly I'm not here to talk about David Firth and all of his off beat creations. I'm here to talk about a very strange, seemingly fan, effort to turn Salad Fingers into a video game. On the one hand I'm certainly not against the idea, especially not in the form of a point and click adventure game, but from the get go things seem amateurish.

While this game is being made with David Firth's blessing, so far the creator's haven't been able to actually get him to help with the game at all. A Salad Fingers story not told by Firth might not pan out so well, but it might be too early to tell. They do have access to some art and sound assets and are still pursuing Firth to provide some voice work, which they promise will be in the game upon completion.

So yeah, Act 1 is more like a demo than anything else. The game is supposed to be split into three acts, and upon finishing them will be collected into a full game released on phones and steam. The end of Act 1 promises that the collected version will last five hours, or more, but the length of Act 1 really makes me doubt that, having finished it in ten minutes or so. More worrisome still is that this game might not even warrant a five hour length.

Point and click adventure games are not my go to genre, I didn't grow up playing them, and honestly the majority of the time they're tedious. I get that these games are typically about the story, the world, the characters, the dialogue, and the ones that I have played have been wonderful excursions, mostly. I like the genre, it just doesn't necessarily draw me in. That aside, this game comes across as severely unpolished. Everything is mouse based (so porting to phones is easier I suspect), you click on arrows on the side of the screen to move from screen to screen (which look ugly), you click and drag items you collect to use them on various things around you as per usual for the genre, and there was even one of those timed "puzzles" point and click games are infamous for (which was this really out of place bar, that also looked rather ugly). I'm not one to gripe on the look of things, and Salad Fingers is a flash based series, but that's no reason to slouch here. In the opening bit there's an original character and a bed, both of which just look badly drawn and attempting to copy Firth's style. Five hours of clearly not Firth trying to draw like Firth? The creepy world, with the attention to detail and style is essential to the feeling and success of anything related to Salad Fingers.

My biggest worry, above all else, is the plot. Plot in Salad Fingers is a dangerous thing, and the game starts out by providing a bit of context to the world. This should not be the case. Yes, in the series Salad Fingers mentions the great war, and it can be inferred that has left the world in this sorry state. But it's an off handed comment from fucking Salad Fingers, an unreliable narrator if ever I saw one. This game opens with you, a nameless fellow, tucking his daughter into bed in the basement. As she asks why they're sleeping down there you can tell her there's a war and to just go to sleep. Then bombs drop, or I assume so at least, and the next thing our hero knows is that he's waking up in Salad Fingers basement on a meat hook.

The whole experience is played out in an incredibly linear fashion, one item leads to the next leads to the next until you're done. There are so few options that even having no clue what to do next is simply remedied by trying everything on everything else, and there being so few things in this demo that doesn't take long at all. There are some callbacks, such as the screeching boy, and Harold the armless brute, a doll Salad Fingers get and the toilet he washes Horace Horsecollar in, nettles and a particular rusty spoon show up as well. Act 1 ends with the main character ripping a doll open a boy gives him, finding a drawing by, what he assumes to be, his daughter, and trying to find him. Of course this is the boy who Salad Fingers tricks into his oven, and that is where you find him all burnt up. The boy seemingly wakes up with (badly drawn) red eyes and starts screaming. The main character starts blinking as the screen turns red and the game ends promising voice work and longer gameplay later.

I'm not opposed to this, especially if whoever is making this polishes the UI, and gameplay as a whole and can get some real creative input from Firth. Even if it's just some ideas and input on the general plot. I'm not sure what all will happen in later acts, but the creator promises seeing events in episodes from a new angle, as well as plenty of original content. I'm just not sure if this guy is capable of making worthwhile content in this universe. Honestly, they're big shoes to fill. Not even big. Weird, lopsided, slightly damp and differently sized shoes to fill. Salad Fingers is a really hard thing to pull off well, and this doesn't fill me with too much hope. Prove me wrong guys.