- Game: Cavalier Game Studio/Tequila Works's The Sexy Brutale.
- Release Month: April.
- Quick Look: Here. (Alex/Dan/Vinny.)
- Started: 04/12.
- Completed: 05/12.
An extravagant masquerade ball at the Marquis's legendary manse, the Sexy Brutale! Nine guests, each to be horrifically and elaborately butchered that night by the Marquis's loyal servants! One priest, who has to save them all with his newly-gained mysterious time-travelling powers! That's the premise for The Sexy Brutale, one of the most entertaining and intelligent adventure/puzzle games I've seen in a while, and particularly in the Indie space where games as complex as this - at least in terms of intricate moving parts - make it a rarity distinct enough to sit in the Marquis's own treasured collection of valuable oddities.
The game has a simple enough goal for each of its episodes: figure out how a guest was murdered, and then foil the murder somehow. Maybe that involves trapping the killer, or disabling the trap at the last moment, or getting out a warning ahead of time. However, there's a complication: the masks themselves are possessed and serve a darker power, and will chase you down as soon as you enter the same space as their wearers. That goes for the killers' and the guests' masks alike, so if you mean to save them you'll have to do so indirectly, preferably from another room or floor.
Part of the brilliance of The Sexy Brutale is that it compartmentalizes each of these murders to foil. There are the occasional twofers, but they're inexorably linked, and only towards the end are you truly pressed for time in trying to save everyone. At any rate, you simply revert back to earlier the same day whether you failed to save them or chose to reset early, ready to put the kibosh on a murder most foul all over again. While you'll need to find all the required items again on a new loop, the information you learn - passcodes, secret entrances - stick with you, as do the movements of the various parties involved as the day progresses. You can spend a whole loop simply observing where the victim starts, where they go, what they talk about, and how they eventually meet their end for hints you might need, and likewise follow the killer for insight on how they've set up and executed the crime. The game takes some clear inspiration from other time-travelling adventure games, in particular Gregory Horror Show (which has a similar macabre theme in an enormous and eccentric building filled with equally eccentric clientele you can't approach) and The Legend of Zelda: Mask of Majora, where having all the time you need for sufficient reconnaissance was often the key to solving an ever-looping mystery.
Enhancing an already strong mechanical core is the sheer style dripping from The Sexy Brutale everywhere you look, from its evocative name down to its smooth soundtrack, witty writing and a bobble-headed faux-isometric presentation which is cute enough to make all the murders delightfully incongruous. "The Sexy Brutale" seems to refer to the mansion itself, but could also apply to the luxury casino, the jazz lounge, and the theater set up for any number of showy magician performances. It has many secrets too, of course, and these are slowly meted out as you continue saving the cast from their grisly fates. As you rescue guests, you also acquire their special abilities - saving the locksmith, for example, now allows you to pick any lock that was barring your way before - and this in turn expands the limits of where you can go, as well as contributing to a playing card deck-themed collectible system which is directly involved with the game's final surprise.
I was quite astonished by this game. It's certainly not a rare thing to see an Indie adventure game take a few risks with an untested concept - the Indie market has proven adept at fostering ingenuity in the once-forsaken graphic adventure genre, from the low-key "walking simulators" to the decision-heavy Telltale games to the FMV open-endedness of Her Story - but I wasn't sure how much I was going to enjoy trying to fit my head around what could literally be called fourth-dimensional puzzles. The Sexy Brutale keeps things simple, at least in relative terms, by ensuring that you're only ever worrying about one or two guests at any given time and reducing the amount of real estate, moving parts and inventory puzzles involved. It's far happier to indulge the type of adventure game player with a fondness for descriptive texts and dialogue with oodles of additional world-building lore and some choice back-and-forth if you stick around to watch the victims and killers interact. The Sexy Brutale cares more about involving you with the stories it's weaving, both in the micro case-by-case sense and in an overarching narrative sense, than trying to stump you with debilitating brainteasers for too long, and it's all the better for it even with the rapidity with which I completed it (though we're still talking 7-8 hours, so either I luxuriated in the setting more than I realized, or there's a substantial amount of content here even if you're pacing through it at a clip).
It's definitely the first game to legitimize this year's Go! Go! GOTY! - at this point I can scarcely imagine a top ten list without The Sexy Brutale, even in the ludicruously well-represented year of 2017.
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