Time is judgment watching you from afar. Getting ready to swing their mighty hammer down upon you. Time is of essence and neither carries a sweet or bitter taste. Time is important and is something we as people don’t seem to appreciate as much as we probably should. I started the review off with these oddly phrased sentences, because today’s game revolves around time. Specifically the clockwork system. The ticking hands of fate. There are very few games out there that utilize the clockwork system and the chance of it using the system right is very low. However when you get it just right you can make an interesting world that not only must the player memorize, but fully engage with to understand. To figure out how the elements of the universe they are in work together, how said elements cooperate to work against the player’s time and management skills, and how the player should plan out their actions so the events they want to happen actually play out. There are two games that come to mind when you mention the clockwork system to me. The first is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask which is one of the first few games to implement the clockwork system into a video game. It wasn’t the first game to invent day and night cycles, but rather reinforce that thought that the player only has much time to achieve what they have in mind. The player has three in-game days, otherwise 72 minutes in real time, to explore the world and do whatever they need to do before a giant moon comes hurling towards the earth and they have to reset time to the very first day. Majora’s Mask was important because not only was it an incredible game in the respected franchise, but helped show that these types of games can work with proper execution and design choices.
More recently there is Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital which just so happens to be not only one of the best adventure games I’ve ever played, but a game that perfectly makes use of the clockwork system. Even better than Manjora’s Mask to be honest. Outer Wilds was this big intergalactic puzzle box with numerous rules, and the player would have to explore the solar system to piece together that puzzle. It offered the player absolute freedom the very moment they exit the first area, and from there is where the adventure truly began. Outer Wilds is the perfect blend of open world styled exploration, time management, creative thinking, and thrill of adventure. If you haven’t played it yet then give it a try. If you want to see a more in depth look in Outer Wilds or games with the clockwork system then I recommend watching two analysis videos. The first video is “Clockwork Games and Time Loops” by design philosopher Mark Brown from Game Maker’s Toolkit. The second video is “How Outer Wilds Make Running Out of Stuff Fun” by Adam Millard - The Architect of Games. At first I thought the brilliant Outer Wilds was the only game of the last decade to handle a clockwork system well. Turns out I have encountered another fantastic indie title that knows what the f*ck it is doing and decides to put a fun twist onto these mechanics. I present to you The Sexy Brutale by Cavalier Game Studios. The project began back in 2013 when Cavalier was formed and decided to collaborate with another indie studio named Tequila Works. The developers behind this stylish project were influenced by games like Moon, Gregory Horror Show, and most importantly the recently mentioned Majora’s Mask. After two years of production Cavalier had an idea of what game to make and tasked Tequila with designing the characters and setting. Four years into development and The Sexy Brutale releases during the early quarter of 2017. The game was received pretty well. A lot of people who just so happened to stumble upon the game enjoyed the many interesting ideas it had and just found it to be a really well designed game. They also enjoyed the retroastetic of the world and how it found a way to weave in a pretty good narrative.
The Sexy Brutale is one of the most underrated puzzle games of the last decade, but does it hold up today. Surprisingly, yes! I was skeptical whether to pick this one up since it didn’t look as fancy as some of the other puzzle games I have played like Outer Wilds and my most favorite Return of The Obra Dinn. I took a leap of faith, bought it, and was immediately surprised with how good it was. I don’t love it as much as Outer Wilds or Return of The Obra Dinn, but god dammit The Sexy Brutale does a lot of things right. Today I’ll be talking about why I loved The Sexy Brutale and why it deserves your attention. So adjust the time of your watch, pull out a deck of cards, and prepare to traverse through the glistening lustrous halls of the Sexy Brutale.
Story
We play as Lafcadio Boone, a preacher who is one of numerous friends to the wealthy and classy Lucas Bondes. Every once a year, Lucas Bondes gathers all of closest friends to host a gigantic party and endorse them all in the luxury and excitement he owns. He usually hosts these parties in his manor, The Sexy Brutale, which is a place that almost has it all. A casino, a neon lit bar, sprawling library, hotel rooms, guest rooms, a glassy chapel, theater for stage play, music room for wonderful performances, a clocktower, secret passages that lead to god knows where, and many more. Lucas Bondes has invited a total of twelve of his friends to attend the galant party, and they spent noon all the way to the next day drinking their sorrowful hearts away.
Lafcadio wakes up near the chapel to find himself being greeted by a mysterious blood soaked woman. The Bloody Girl from what the game calls her, tells Lafcadio that something is wrong in the manor and she gives him a broken pocket watch. She directs Lafcadio to the chapel and by looking through a keyhole he witnesses the tinkerer Sixpence get shot down by one of the mansion’s workers who walks away without being noticed. The pocket watch Lafcadio was given then rewinds back to 12 PM and soon he realizes that he is reliving the events of the party over and over. The Bloody Girl tells him that he can prevent the death of Sixpence if he tries hard enough, so Lacadio does just that. He finds a way to rig the gun the killer was using and he prevents Sixpence’s untimely death. Sixpence is relieved to be alive and notices that Lafcadio is using a pocket watch designed by him. He fixes it and soon heads out of the chapel.
The Bloody Girl then reveals to Lafcadio that ten individuals died at the party that night and it’s up to Lafcadio to find numerous ways to prevent each of their deaths. She then transports him to the main lobby of The Sexy Brutale and from there he ventures off to explore the manor. He’ll have to constantly manipulate time, unlock new powers to stop each death or open the passageways of the manor, and unravel what is really going on behind the curtains. It’s all up to him to stop that “night” at The Sexy Brutale.
Gameplay
The Sexy Brutale can kinda be imagined as an alternate universe version of the classical Return of The Obra Dinn. Both games have magic pocket watches that manipulate time in some way to witness events, but while Return of The Obra Dinn has a pocket that allows you to witness the last second before a person dies here in The Sexy Brutale you use to unwind time and alter events. Unlike the deductive murder mysteries of Obra Dinn which required key analyzation, Sexy Brutale is more focused on “how” it happened rather than “what” happened. You explore each area of the manor interacting with the objects around you, figuring out what leads to where, picking up special items, and figuring out how specific individuals died.
Your job is to come up with a plan to stop their untimely fate. Sometimes you’ll be tasked to help one individual, and at other times you’ll have to stop the death of two individuals at once. You can spy on events by peeking through the keyholes of doors, but you cannot be in a room with a living person currently in it. If so then a ghastly mask will appear and begin to chase you down. It will try to corrupt your mind and send you back to the beginning of the day, but you can evade them by exiting the room. It doesn’t matter though, because the masks take a few seconds before they start hunting you down and you can just dash by them if you have somewhere to go. Certain information and secrets will only be obtained if you listen to what individuals have to say. The special items you pick up are sometimes needed to prevent a person’s death.
I’m not gonna try and spoil what you do later on in the game, so let’s just use the first death as an example. If you watch Sixpence dig through a locked vault you’ll notice a bullet land onto the ground. The bullet is actually a blank cartidge and you can insert it into the gun the murderer uses to prevent him from landing a shot on Sixpence. Certain events will happen at specific times and if you are too late then you must perform the whole operation all over, so make sure to use your time wisely. If you do screw up the order of events and want to restart the cycle immediately then you can use your pocket watch to rewind time to the beginning hour of the party. You will restart the day at the clock you choose to synchronize your pocket watch to, these being checkpoints through the manor, and you have the ability to skip to either 4 pm or 8 pm if you want to. Otherwise you can wait for events to happen again.
Once you save a guest they will take off their mask and congratulate you for helping them. They’ll then leave the room and you can pick up their mask to gain a new power. These powers are needed to stop the death of later guests and unlock new areas of the manor to explore. It’s sort of like a metroidvania progression, but The Sexy Brutale sometimes spawns you in the area you are supposed to go through next. Probably so that you don’t get lost while trying to find the next major story path. Powers will include the ability to closely listen to the whispers, pick certain locks, shatter glass objects, and many more. There are also cards and invitations scattered around for you to collect, but they aren’t needed to beat the game.. Although they do offer a bonus if you can find them all. Besides that there isn’t much else I can say about the game. The Sexy Brutale is a simple puzzle adventure that expands the deeper you go. Hopefully you can stop each murder and figure out why you keep reliving the same day over and over again.
Thoughts
The Sexy Brutale is an excellently well designed puzzle game that I ended up enjoying more than I should have. Each of the deaths I was tasked to prevent had tons of information to unfold and the way you stop each one was really unique. This isn’t like preventing a death in certain open world games where you just have to intervene and fight the killers. You have to think outside the box and find a way to stop them from a distance. The game decided to go for a unique look, being a mixture of cartoonish graphics and 3D models. Where everyone has scrawny bodies, but humongous heads for some reason. The soundtrack was really nice as well. You’ll be hearing the same themes and tracks over and over like if this was Banjo-Kazooie or Luigi’s Mansion, but the bands that orchestrated the main theme did a damn good job at making it as jazzy and catchy as possible. It’s still stuck in my head hours after completion. One of my favorite aspects of The Sexy Brutale that I don’t think people will appreciate as much is the setting and ascetic. I’m a big fan of 70s or 80s themed settings like The Sexy Brutale. There is a reason why the neon color lit underwater City of Rapture from BioShock is one of my favorite locations in gaming. It’s the spectacle and the feeling like a specific period of time froze and didn’t tarnish over the next few centuries.
The story ended up being quite good. It starts off very slow at first and the premise isn’t much to care about, but later on it begins to pull you in with all its twists and reveals. You start to wonder what actually happened, who is pulling the strings, and why you out of all the guests were chosen to handle these dire tasks. Then the game starts to dive into the topics of regret, sin, and being able to accept death even when your life wasn’t the greatest. It’s a good murder mystery that pulls you along for the ride. I really liked The Sexy Brutale and would go far to say that I absolutely recommend it. It’s one of the most unique puzzle games created recently and we won’t be seeing another game like this ever again in the future which is a little sad, but I do have to clarify there were problems with The Sexy Brutale. I could go on and give this game a high review score, but that would make it look like I’m pandering to an indie studio like I usually do.
The way that ghastly masks chase you down is weird, because while they aren’t frightening they don’t do much to pursue you or hold you back. Half the time you can end up walking past them and continuing to where you need to go, because it takes more than five seconds for a ghastly mask to start chasing you and you can navigate to the other side of the room within half of that time. It would have been made to have a mechanic where when the ghastly masks show up your movement speed is cut in half. For a game with a total of ten deaths to stop, six of these deaths being in pairs of two, it’s weird that they didn’t allow you to solve them in any order. This is explainable because the game follows a linear fashion due to how you need certain powers to solve more complex deaths, but this kinda limits the replay value with the game.
That’s the one aspect I hate about fantastic puzzle games like Outer Wilds and Return of The Obra Dinn. These two little games are absolute masterpieces and succeed in every area they set out to explore, but once you know the key details or how to solve each problem there really isn’t a reason to go back. The satisfaction of figuring the mysteries out on your own from the first playthrough is lost and the second playthrough begins to turn from good to passable since now you’re just slogging through to get to the meaty good parts later on in the game. The parts where the story’s twists and reveals start to kick in. The Sexy Brutale doesn’t even last that long. It’s about five hours and an additional one hour if you spend the time to find every collectible to unlock a secret ending. However, The Sexy Brutale is one of the few games I found worth one hundred percenting because what you unlock at the end is unique and adds a bit of depth and reward to the story. So even though the game is worth only playing once it doesn’t mean it’s a game you should skip out on. Play it to feel the satisfaction upon beating one of the most smartly designed puzzle games of the last decade. In the end I give The Sexy Brutale a 9/10 for excellence at best.
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