The Sexy Brutale: Theme in Game Mechanics
The Sexy Brutale is a top-down style puzzle game with an interesting premise: the whole game essentially boils down to replaying the same ten-minute period over and over again in order to save nine guests from being murdered.
I’m going to be honest here, the main thing that had me deciding to check this game out was how curious I was about how this could possibly work in a way that didn’t feel like a repetitive grind. And, well, not only did it pull off this feat, but it did so in a way that felt so rewarding to dive deeper into.
The Sexy Brutale uses its core mechanic of time loops to affective demonstrate themes a man struggling to work past his guilt, as well his former gambling addiction.
The Basic Set Up
The game starts out with some text explaining that these kinds of masquerade parties are thrown by the Marquis every year, but that this one is different. You are playing as Lufcadio Boone, and as everything comes into focus you are lying on the ground. The game has this woozy, dream-like sense to it as the world pulls in and out, the picture fading to black and then coming back, all as Lufcadio comes to consciousness.
A woman who is known only as Bloody Girl appears, and tells you it’s “time to move on, old man.” You are told you have a chance, but some unknown figure you are up against is strong. Before she says any more, she disappears into a pool of blood.
This is something to keep in mind. Right from the hop, before any real play has begun, devoid of all context until hindsight reveals what’s going on, we’re told exactly what this game is about. “Time to move on.”
At this point you get to move, but you’re very much on rails for where you get to go as the game walks you through the path of a man just before he is murdered. Time is rewound, and then you are led through the path of the murderer.
It‘s here that the game starts more in earnest, and you get to take control and move about how you’d like as you try to save this first victim’s life. Mainly this comes down to a puzzle of how to stop a murder when you cannot interact with either party, the solution coming from seeing exactly how they move right up until the murder takes place. Time resets each time the murder happens, or if you know you missed a key moment, you can reset it yourself. As you learn the cycle, you can sneak in where you need to and stop the murder.
After finally saving the life of this first victim, you are given the fixed pocket watch, giving you the ability to stay around for the full 12 hours (aprox. 10 minutes real time) of the day of the murders, as well as the ability to sync up to clocks to use them as a new starting position for the day.
From the point the game continues to be much the same as this, but with a bigger scope. You are given free rein to move throughout The Sexy Brutale mansion in order to save all its nine guests. Some passages are blocked and can only be accessed after having received new abilities from saving guests and collecting their masks. Others are time dependent and require knowledge of when people will be clear of particular rooms in order to move through them yourself.
This is all great. It’s a very fun puzzle game with a darkly cartoonish aesthetic and a horny heavy soundtrack that gives it all the sense of taking place in the early 1900s.
Time Loops and Guilt Trips
The real heart of the game is one that is revealed mainly through retrospective. As you reach the climax, masks come off and identities are revealed. The Marquis (the man who throws the party), the Gold Skull (the villain trying to kill everyone), and player’s character, Boone, are all one in the same: a man named Lucas Bondes.
The entire situation around this time loop was created by Lucas’s guilt after an accident he caused killed all his friends (the guests), leaving him the only survivor. He forced himself into this position, where he, as the Gold Skull, kills them again and again for all of time, refusing to let himself forget the horrible thing he did.
It was through Bloody Girl, the horrible remains of Lucas’s wife that still haunt him mind, that brought Boone in to end the situation. Bloody Girl represents the part of Lucas that knows none of them would want him to go on this way, that they would want him to move on.
It’s interesting to note that in the world inside Lucas’s mind the most helpful, loving figure, the one who is putting him on the path to work past this, is also the most monstrous. Whether this is because he feels the most guilty over her death, or because of how wrong he feels it would be to just move on (or, possible both), it is hard to say exactly.
By the time the events of the game begin, Lucas is old and grey. He’s a man who’s wasted away in prison for many years and kept alive mainly through life support (we see all the evidence of this when we reach the basement of the mansion). His entire life has gone by, never letting himself forget.
Playing through these loops puts the player into the mind Boone, the part of Lucas’s mind that wants so desperately to move on, while not remembering at all what from. This is a part of him so willing to forget, he completely has. Not only that, but he’s made himself another character entirely so that he can see the events as being done by someone wholly separate from himself.
We’re tasked with saving the guests to stop the loops, living through it again and again ourselves until we can finally get it right. And then, finally, we get all the context.
When the game reaches its ending, we are given the story of what really happened, how an accident led to Lucas killing the other characters in the game. With this in mind, the player is given the choice of whether to let Lucas move on, or to continue the cycle of his self-made torment. The former choice leads to everybody being saved at once, and credits rolling. The latter leads to beginning the day at back at noon, just like has always happened.
Collectables and Gambling
Like many games, The Sexy Brutale includes collectables. Here they take the form of a deck of cards. Each card is scattered throughout the mansion, and every completist style player is bound to go hunting for them. It is through this innocuous game convention that the aspect of gambling addiction in its theme is created.
There is the obvious connection, which is the choice of having the collectables be a deck of cards you are trying to put together. But, on its own this doesn’t necessarily represent any kind of addiction. A deck of cards could just be something that has a decent number of things to collect.
Hidden inside the mansion is the “key of old habits”. If the player finds this and uses it to open a locked door, they find a hulking demon that tells them to collect all the cards. If it isn’t clear from the name of the key, this demon is the personification of the Lucas’s past gambling addiction. The demon tells you, “Forget them all. Just play, Boone. Lose yourself in the game. I will take care of you.”
We also hear about this addiction in the climax of the game. It is because of his gambling addiction that Lucas was able to afford this mansion, but he gave it all up for his wife.
This is all interesting backstory, but it gets deeper. This is a game where timing is crucial. And what do collectables do? They take away from time spent on the main goal. Even before the player realizes what any of it means, they could be spending whole loops ignoring the fact that they should be trying to save the guests in order to collect these cards. This is affectively giving into the addiction.
So, what happens when you collect all the cards and return them to the demon?
Bringing every card to the demon unlocks a different ending, one where everyone is in this perpetual party and no one seems to know anything about the murders. There is no way to progress, the game only exists in two rooms, the entrance and the party. The only exit is to break the stained-glass window, and only through shattering the glass does the illusion, and the game, comes to an end.
The game gets incredibly depressing when considering how collectable gathering can tend to go, which is that after the game is done the player goes back to finish the hunt for them (ie: exactly how I played it).
I reached the end of the game without having collected all the cards, so I needed to choose to keep the loops going in order to keep finding cards. At this point I’m ignoring the guests and strictly looking for the cards, until, finally I find them all and get this alternate ending.
What this means in context is that I choose to make Lucas continue to suffer in his guilt, only to avoid the problem and have him lose himself in gambling instead.
Conclusions
The Sexy Brutale takes a relatively simple mechanic and uses it masterfully to create a metaphor for being trapped in guilt. The puzzles that make up the game aren’t in place only categorize it in the genre, but instead to use the puzzle genre to tell its story.
This is something a lot of games can learn from. Games as a storytelling medium have something completely unique to them, the interactive quality inherent in them. It is in using this interactive element as an aspect of the story rather than something completely apart from the story, that a stronger synthesis between the two can be formed. And with that, comes more rewarding opportunities to look deeper into every aspect of the game.