Quick Review: The Sexy Brutale

back at noon, ready to stop another crime.

Ooh! A show! I can't miss that!

Developed by Cavalier Games Studio and Tequila Works, published by the latter, and released on April 11th, 2017, The Sexy Brutale takes place entirely within the mansion housing the titular casino. You are the elderly Lafcadio Boone, one of several guests invited by the Marquis, owner of the mansion, to a masked soirée. What the guests don’t know, however, is that they’re targeted for murder. Awakened by a mysterious girl drenched in blood, Boone is handed a stopwatch that allows him to toy with time itself. His new quest? To prevent every murder.

I mean, if you had the ability to rewind time while living a murder plot, wouldn’t you try to prevent it from happening?

Witness every murder. How else can you later stop it?

However, you’re limited: you cannot be seen by anyone wearing a mask, or the room will go dark, and their mask will attack you. If someone is in a room you’re about to enter, a fire will appear over Lafcadio’s head. When that happens, you can peek and listen through the door (using X) instead. Alternately, you can hide into closets. Time at midnight resets back to noon. The map, accessible with the Esc key, will store any relevant information, and you can even use it alongside a time slider to keep track of every character’s schedule, provided you’ve followed their trail. You can wind clocks to get a new respawn position when looping back to noon, though it requires finding the right key for each clock.

For the record, the bell rings on every loop where you
do not rescue this woman. At the same hour every time.
Even after you did save her once. Let's just say, you
can never forget that this happens over and over.

Whenever you save a guest(s), you obtain a mask with a new ability, which will become necessary to save the next. These abilities, in turn, let you unlock more areas of the mansion, with each guest (or pair) to save being confined to one area. However, the puzzles themselves might not be confined to that area, and thus the game encourages exploring over and over.

The puzzles involve figuring out the right timing and sequence of actions to rescue each person, which means snooping on them, as clues can be found in their dialogue, or that of anyone involved in their demise. Between loops, you get to remember significant information but you lose items with a few exceptions. On top of the main quest, you can also collect every guest’s invitation, as well as all 52 cards of a standard deck.

The bottom right stopwatch also helpfully indicates who
is gonna bite it this time (by showing their masks), and
when. Therefore, you know how much time you have
to act.

For a place that starts out looking normal, time loop
notwithstanding, there sure are a lot of giant spiders,
voodoo trinkets, and other supernatural crap lying around!
That's not even mentioning the [spoilers]!

The game looks great and has excellent music; you’ll be humming the songs heard in the casino. Even better is its sound design, as a lot of events are alluded to that way, and you can use the noise of footsteps in other rooms to figure out whether someone’s coming, or significant cues related to your current mission. Then, beneath the surface, there’s a lot of smart details regarding art and literature to look for. Gameplay is unusual, since you move Lafcadio around with the right-click of the mouse instead of the arrows or WASD. It does work out in the end, though.

And yep, you can even follow the characters' movements
around the map.

Lucas, the Marquis, remains unseed and a complete mystery
up until it's time for his part in the plot. So, he's either the
final person we rescue, or the brains behind the murders.

And though it’s very strong in so many areas, nowhere is it stronger than in its plot. We could mull over the clever construction of the intrigue across the 12 hours we visit over and over, and the various character interactions we see as a result (and how we influence each loop). But there’s even more brilliance to be found here: Each rescue reveals some pieces of the wider puzzle behind this strange situation, sure. But there’s a ton of little nods and clues you can find on your own, that are hidden in plain sight, and reveal so much more about the actual twist – and some of these may be dismissed as mere gameplay or stylistic elements, until it all comes together at the final stretches. It’s so great. It’s expertly written, and if you don’t know what’s coming, you’ll be astonished. The story alone makes this game worth playing.

The Sexy Brutale is available on Steam for 19.99$ USD. With all this done, I can focus on the task at hand. Just a rewind and I’m