If you haven’t caught on by now, there’s a special place in my heart for weird and obscure video games. However, in this age of rampant Indie development, it can be hard to find the good weird and obscure games. First and foremost, a game needs to be fun. If a game is just weird for the sake of being weird (or even worse, for the sake of “art”), then I have no interest in it. I echo Nintendo’s stance on video games, they are toys, not art. They are vehicles of fun and entertainment. Thankfully, the unfortunately titled game, The Sexy Brutale (TSB), is both weird and fun (not to mention a little macabre, as well).
If I were to give an elevator pitch of TSB, I would say it’s And The There Were None mixed with Groundhog Day. Or, in more game-y terms, Clue mixed with Majora’s Mask. The game starts out with the player taking on the role of the game’s protagonist, Lafcadio Boone. An old priest of some sort, with a strange mask covering his face. Boone is found lying on the floor of a room of a large mansion (the mansion also houses a casino, which is called the Sexy Brutale, hence the game’s odd title). He is then greeted by a strange, blood drenched woman, who appears to him via a pool of blood. The woman explains that only he can change the horrific events that unfold in the mansion that day. With a little more dialogue, the bloody woman sends Boone to observe the events around him, but is warned to not be seen by the mansion’s guests or staff. Following those instructions, the player sees a man in a clockwork-style mask rummaging around the mansion before being confronted by a gas mask wearing staff member, who promptly shoots him dead. Before the player can do anything else, Boone is suddenly hurled back in time. Now in a different room from where the game initially started, the player is treated to scenes of the staff member finding the gun, then going to confront the guest in the clockwork mask, and killing him once again. After having seen the same event from both the perspective of the killer and the victim, Boone is again transported back in time, once more finding himself in the room at the start of the game. The woman explains that time will continue to rewind, replaying the same day over and over again, until Boone can prevent the murders of the guests in the mansion. He is also given a pocket watch, so that the player can now reset time at will (the player never has complete mastery over time, as it always rewinds to twelve noon). No longer a mere observer, the player now has free reign to attempt to foil the murder they have seen occur twice now.
This scene serves as the game’s tutorial section, and does a good job of explaining almost all of the game’s mechanics in clear and useful ways. It’s mostly showing vs telling. As I said earlier, a large portion of the game requires Boone to travel around the mansion, and observe what’s happening, to get a good grip on who’s being murdered, and how. The player is taught the basics through observing the victim’s and killer’s movements. They’re shown how to go through doors, to spy through keyholes to see who or what is in an undiscovered room (with limited sight range), they can use “listen” to hear footsteps or muffled voices in adjoining rooms (I found this particular skill rather useless), and they can hide in wardrobes to observe the events in a particular room firsthand.
If it wasn’t obvious yet, Boone cannot be allowed to be seen by anyone else in the mansion, everything he does, must be done stealthily. If Boone is seen by anyone wearing a mask, time will freeze, and the mask of the other person (guest or servant, it doesn’t matter) will give chase, trying to kill Boone. I usually loathe stealth games, and even in TSB, I was not a fan of this particular mechanic. It makes sense that Boone can’t be seen by the staff (i.e. the killers) but to force him to hide from the guests (the people he’s trying to save) was a little perplexing to me. And it’s never really explained why it is the way it is.
But I digress. Foiling this first murder is relatively simple. In the player’s first two observations, they saw the victim tossing aside a blank cartridge while rummaging through a safe, looking for something else. Meanwhile, they also saw the staff member finding a mounted gun in another room, checking to see that it was still loaded. Putting two and two together, this puzzle can be solved rather easily. After watching the victim toss aside the blank, the player simply needs to enter the now empty room, collect the blank, go to the room with the gun, before the killer gets there (as the same day is on a constant loop, through observation, players can learn a certain characters exact movements at any given time [much like Majora’s Mask]), and insert the blank cartridge into the gun. Upon doing this, the player is immediately sent to a new cut scene, only this time, when the killer tries to fire the gun, his plan is foiled, giving the victim a chance to knock out the killer with a well aimed throw of a nearby candlestick.
Upon successfully foiling the murder attempt, the victim removes his mask and greets Boone, who is now able to approach him without fear of demon mask spirits chasing him out of the room. After realizing that Boone was responsible for saving his life, he thanks him, then leaves. Boone is then once again greeted by the bloody woman, who explains the masks of the victims saved will give Boone special powers that he can use to save the rest of the guests. The clockwork mask gives Boone the ability to travel forward in time to four or eight PM (not an ability I used all that often, admittedly). Other powers include: enhanced hearing, the ability to see and speak with the mansion’s ghosts, the power to shatter certain types of glass, and the ability to pick locks. After getting this first power, the bloody woman reminds Boone (again) that he must save everyone.
Time then resets, and Boone finds himself in an entirely new area of the mansion (yet another unexplained phenomenon, Boone often teleports randomly after saving a guest’s life). From here on out, the game is finished holding the player’s hand. It is fully up to them to explore the mansion, and spy on its guests and staff to figure out who to save next, and how. Ultimately, it all boils down to the same formula: observe the events in the areas accessible to the player (only certain portions of the mansion will ever be accessible at certain portions of the game, giving the player at least a little guidance in where their focus should be at any given time), watch the movements and actions of the guests and staff, investigate the areas, make use of any items available, reset time as much as needed until you solve the current puzzle and save the guest(s).
It’s an interesting take on the “murder mystery” genre, as it totally turns it on it’s head. It makes use of inductive reasoning rather than deductive reasoning. You’re not trying to figure out the answer to “Who killed Mr. Body?” You already know. You’re trying to stop them from killing him in the first place, so to speak.
Mechanically speaking, I do have a few complaints. The mansion is rather large and resetting time means resetting your location. To counter this, there are clocks positioned throughout the mansion, that the player can interact with. These clocks act as save/checkpoints. Any time the player resets time, they’ll be transported to the last clock they interacted with. While this is incredibly useful, especially late in the game, the clocks can’t be used until you find the clock’s winding key. The key would usually be in a different room nearby, but these keys were often easy to miss. And there were times where I couldn’t find the key before time ran out. So I would be transported far from my destination when time reset, all for lack of a key to a clock that I had already found.
The size of the mansion and a complete lack of any sort of fast travel is a great hindrance, especially when it comes to preventing the final murders, which require the player to travel across almost the entire mansion, to collect items and interact with certain environmental puzzles. This problem was made even worse by the fact that many of the mansions doors had a strange blue flame covering them. Guests and staff could go through these doors at will, but the player could not. Forcing them to go through roundabout paths just to get to a given room. These path blockers were frustrating, and nonsensical. And in a game where literally every second counts, it was just poor design.
Overall, though, it’s a clever little game. The puzzles are very unique, but more often than not, they’re never too complex. Sure, a player might need to re-watch the same scene a few times before they see what they need, but the solution always presents itself if the player is vigilant. I will say, that seeing the same scene over and over again can get very boring though. And sometimes, it’s not because I couldn’t figure something out, it was that I didn’t figure it out in time. So I was forced to see certain events play out multiple times, just to get to a certain section that had a very small window in which I could do what I needed to do.
But, if the player is willing to work their way past these dull and poorly designed bits, they’ll be rewarded with a very fun, unique experience, complete with a bizarre twist ending. Because, hey, what good would a mystery be without a twist, right?
