Presentation
The game immediately makes a good impression. The setpieces are quite impressive and will easily convince you you're walking through a stylish, old-fashioned mansion. The setpieces are so impressive, in fact, that the game took longer than expected to load in certain rooms and showed empty space in the meantime - as the timer kept ticking on. It wasn't a huge issue, but it happened pretty consistently around major area transitions.
The music is also great, featuring many jazzy bangers. Each major section of the mansion has its own music, and the tracks build towards a climax as the preventable death of the guests you're trying to save in that section approaches. The sound effects are fine in general, with my only gripe being that the noise that plays when there is a ghost in the room - the sound of roaring fire followed by a loud cackle - is too loud, and it plays every time. Either making the sound more subtle or only playing it the first time you discover a given ghost would be a way to fix this.
All in all, the presentation is fantastic with only minor nitpicky complaints concerning loading times and a sound effect or two that can get too loud and repetitive.
Gameplay
In many ways, the game feels like a real-time point and click adventure. Your actions mainly consist of walking around, examining objects, picking up items and using items on objects. The looming time limit is the major threat, but you're also not allowed to explore rooms where a living person currently is. If you enter such a room, the person's mask - and everyone in the game wears one - will come alive and chase you down. In this state, nothing in the room can be interacted with, and if the enemy mask touches you for too long, it will drain your health. It's very basic, but that's because it really only exists to keep you out of the room; this forces you to think ahead and take note when people enter certain rooms. Some rooms are just blocked off arbitrarily, however, as recognized by the interact circle being red and the door being on fire - something the game could explain a bit better. My only real gripe with the core gameplay is that the player character, Lafcardio, moves pretty slowly and that some area transitions take too long - for example, if you interact with a ladder or stairway by accident, there's no way to cancel out of the several seconds it'll take to go back and forth. In a bog standard point and click adventure that'd just be a nuisance, but considering you're on a timer that doesn't stop for text boxes or transitions, it's a slightly bigger problem here.
This plays into the key part of The Sexy Brutale's puzzles; it's all about time. Some of the murders can only be prevented by putting the pieces in place long before the unfortunate guest breathes his or her last. Each guest has a schedule, and only by learning it - as well as the staff's movements and their murder method - can you ultimately save them. Every time the clock hits midnight, or when you use your pocket watch, you'll return to the start of the day. You will lose any items you're carrying but knowledge - like keycodes and secret passages - will be preserved so you can get the items back pretty easily.
Every time a guest is saved, you acquire their mask and special power. Some of these are game changers, while most of them barely matter. An example of the former is the Superior Hearing power. By holding a button, you can hear all footsteps and conversations in the rooms around you, which helps you keep tabs on everyone and lets you overhear critical information. Other powers include shattering glass objects and picking locks, but these are only used a few times in the story and are otherwise applied to find optional collectibles. One of the powers allows you to see ghosts, but only when their associated candle is lit. This leads to a strange situation where you need to find the lighter to fully capitalize on this power, and when you do, it stays with you forever in your item menu - completely contrary to all other items except the wristwatch you start with. It's a strange inconsistency and makes me feel like the lighter should've been added as part of the mask when found instead of put in a separate item menu.
In terms of difficulty, the game never gets very hard. Provided you find an area's clock and winding key, you can set it as your spawn point and you can restart the day whenever you want, as often as you want. What can be frustrating, however, is waiting for a specific moment of the day to reoccur - say, you know one of the guests says something important at 3 PM, so you want to skip to that, but unfortunately you can only skip to 4 PM and 8 PM. I don't really understand this limit; if you're at the clock and you inserted its winding key, why can't you skip to whichever time you want? This is not a game breaker, but it will lead to the occasional few minutes of waiting around, which can get especially frustrating if you just barely miss a vital point of information. But once it all comes together, it's very satisfying. The last few puzzles in particular had me smiling from ear to ear when I used all the pieces and information the game had presented throughout and applied them. The game also has a secret ending you can acquire by gathering all the optional collectibles, which is a fun extra for people who enjoy exploring every nook and cranny.
The Sexy Brutale's gameplay holds up pretty well, but is bogged down by some strange inconsistencies. But when it's good, which is most of the time, it is really good.
Story
I don't want to spoil the story for you, so I'll keep this as general as possible. In the Sexy Brutale, you play as Lafcardio, a guest at the hotel-casino the game is named for. He and all the other guests are killed by the staff for unknown reasons, but a mysterious entity revives him and gives him the power to go back in time. His - and by extension your - mission is to use your power to save the other guests and figure out what's going on.
The characters are well-written and have a lot of snark and dark humour to offer, which got a chuckle out of me on several occasions. The murders themselves also vary from mundane - like someone getting shot in the chest - to utterly bizarre, like being eaten by a giant spider. When you save a guest, you're treated to a funny or heartwarming scene between them and Lafcardio before moving on to the next. It's nice to have those moments, especially because the game's tone is pretty grim and cynical overall.
I'll leave you to discover what's really going on at The Sexy Brutale and why the guests are getting murdered, but I will say that the ending has some pretty impressive foreshadowing. If you're like me, you'll have a few moments where things click and you go 'Oh, so that's why' or 'So that's what that meant.'
The Sexy Brutale's story is as dark as it is comedic, but knows when to take a moment for sincere interactions between the characters. It has plenty of twists to offer and I enjoyed it a lot.
Comparisons
I made a conscious effort not the draw the obvious comparisons in the content above, but two obvious examples of games that have some similarities would be Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - two games that also revolve around time-based puzzles. I didn't want to invoke these games in the actual content of the review because, while there are parallels, the games are still so different that it's not really fair to put one in the shadow of the other. A similar situation arrises when comparing Ace Attorney to Danganronpa; those games are closer to each other than any two given random visual novels, but the similarities are still too shallow to call them one of a kind.
With that said, if you were to compare them, The Sexy Brutale falls somewhere in the middle of Majora's Mask and Ghost Trick. Like Ghost Trick, it revolves around interacting with the environment to prevent a murder, but Ghost Trick's puzzles are much more compact (they're usually limited to one room and you always return to 4 minutes before the person's death as opposed to the start of the day like in Brutale). Like Majora's Mask, it spans across a larger amount of time, across multiple environments, and all murders are occurring at about the same time. In the end, though, it's really nothing like either game when it comes to how it plays.
In Conclusion
With an impressive and stylish presentation, compelling story and characters and entertaining puzzle gameplay, The Sexy Brutale is an impressive piece of work. It's held back slightly by some inconsistencies in its design and presentation, but nothing that ruins the game. Give it a try!
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