The Sexy Brutale Reviews

Nice time loop mechanic and storyline.

Amazing concept. Amazing story.

I remember having a lot of fun with "Gregory Horror Show" on the PS2. Unfortunately, I could not replicate it here. Go check this game out, if you have not played this genre.

Liked the story and the puzzles. Fun music and graphics.

Nice logic puzzles based on timing, unique setting of an insane casino that is plagued by a series of murders, and a plot twist to rock your socks off. Can't recommend enough!

I think that this game had a bundle of potential but it never reached any of it. To start off on the positives, the visuals are nice and the art style is fun. The individual character writing tends to be fun, I like hearing the staff and guests converse throughout. The music is nice (although the pause/map screen loop gets monotonous and annoying as it interrupts the good stuff). That's mostly where the praise ends though. The game is a puzzle game but the puzzles are incredibly easy. The most stuck I ever got was on the first one, because I got impatient and missed an item that only drops halfway through the loop, but I never got stuck after that. Every puzzle feels like it has at most 1 or 2 layers. For example when I got to the second puzzle I found a piece of information, and interacted with 2 things in the map and accidentally solved it. I was expecting it to be a progression point towards saving the couple but it was the whole thing, the game instantly snapped to a cutscene of them being saved. This makes the game lack a nice weight to progression. You're given new abilities as you progress but most of them barely matter in any of the puzzles! Most of them exist to help you escape the area of the mansion you're locked in for the current puzzle, and maybe let you get some collectibles elsewhere. But even aside from the massively lacking puzzles there's also just in my opinion the worst part, this game massively lacks in quality of life. To start, I played this game on keyboard and mouse and this game could easily be made mouse-only which would have been a lot more enjoyable, but it uses a few keys (shift, x, space) for rarely used abilities. This feels like an insanely huge piece of missed potential (and would make it work on mobile easily). Secondly, everything you do feels slow. Most of the game you will spend walking across the rooms, or waiting for the door animations to finish. You have a hearing mechanic but you need to hold a key for it to work, which immortalizes you so you can never use it with movement to say, listen for footsteps and get into hiding. The game all over suffers from this, none of the moment-to-moment mechanics flow well together. Honestly this game feel issue makes things feel awful especially as time goes on, it would be so much easier to play if this was smoothed out. This ties in to the difficulty of the game. The game isn't hard at all because the issue of being spotted is so easy to avoid, you can enter a room with characters in it, run across it and enter a different door and they won't even start damaging you. If someone is walking into the room you're in you can just use the same door as them and phase through each other to avoid being spotted. I think if the mechanics felt more smooth then the difficulty could be boosted and still lead to it feeling nice but as it stands if it did have a harsh difficulty, then you would feel cheated so often from the slow door animations and slow listening. Another issue is how the game feels like it dislikes attempts at 100%ing it. Each character has their invitation you can find which gives you information on them. After the first one (you find it on the first guys body, barely a spoiler that early honestly), you'd expect that the rest would work the same way right? [spoiler]Well, yeah it does. For the next two, but after that the rest of them are mostly found in random different ways.[/spoiler] This is super confusing and hard to get used to. But worse, the game has 52 collectible cards, but there are zero hints as to where they are, meaning that you can't fully eliminate any part of the map until you're done. The game only tells you the total out of 52, and doesn't even tell you which cards you are missing. This is a pain, especially since the card placement to say the least, can suck. I ended up with 51/52 cards, so I had to open my save in a text editor and count all the cards until I found which one was left and look it up, and well, it wasn't in some notable place or anything, it was in a random bookshelf (basically every other bookshelf just has flavor text). Which was torture. One of the last abilities you get gives you an ability that gives you lore on most of the rooms you enter which feels obscene, since it forces you to backtrack to areas that even if you swept well and found all the cards, you still need to go back and stand near the middle of the room (if you're near a door or object it won't show the prompt) and hit X to unlock the lore. Honestly as a whole this just, makes the process annoying as hell, I question why I even bothered because it never felt satisfying. Lastly I don't feel like going into details, but the story starts off nice, and does grow more interesting, but has a twist that kinda just, ruins it for me. I feel like a lot of the weight was lost by it. I'm sure other reviews mention it but it does put a fowl twist on it all. Overall, yeah, this is a lot of issues/complaints. Should you ever play the game? Yeah I mean if it was like, less than €5 I don't see why not, but otherwise the gameplay really just doesn't justify it. The OST is probably more worth it than the game itself unfortunately. If you get it cheap and you have the time then sure, but I wouldn't jump for it.

This is the kind of game that really makes me wish Steam had a "neutral" review option. I was debating for a while whether I wanted to have a positive or negative score, but ultimately decided that if I hadn't gotten this game for 75% off then I would be feeling quite a bit less charitable. [h2]The Gambit[/h2] The Sexy Brutale is a game which [i]should[/i] be a lot of fun based on its premise. I was really looking forward to it, but this game commits the unfortunate sin of missing its potential at every turn. It's a puzzle game in which the puzzles are too easy. It's a game about exploring a mansion in which you deal with a handful of rooms at a time. It's a game where you regularly get new abilities, but none of them ever amount to more than a context check. It's tremendously disappointing that it turned out like this; the game as it is does not amount to much. The art style and writing are wonderfully executed, and they take most of the credit for making this game a broadly pleasant experience all the way through, but I can't in good conscience say that that makes up for the many other shortcomings. The conceit - using a Groundhog Day-style time loop to prevent murders from taking place à la Ghost Trick in the backdrop of a sprawling mansion - brings to mind a world of possibilities to unravel. Requiring us to pay close attention to schedules, needing us to fret to and fro to get set up, testing our knowledge of the rooms; yet it never pays off. [h2]The Brutale[/h2] Plainly, the game doesn't do enough of itself. It's like watching an infant learn to walk and then expecting it to grow up and develop, but by the time it's moving out of the house it's still a child taking uncertain wobbly steps. To wit: the extremely straightforward tutorial puzzle is representative of [i]every other [/i] puzzle in the game. I accidentally solved the second puzzle without resetting because I was trying to discover what there was to do! None of the puzzles ever get more difficult. They arguably require you to pay more attention to what people are doing, but the actual logical sequence of interactions amounts to basically one thing for every murder in the story. There aren't even enough interactable components for errors to come about. If you removed the interaction prompts that are purely optional, the game would be shockingly bare. Each murder takes place in a different area of the mansion with no gameplay connections to one another, so you're effectively solving a small puzzle across ten or so rooms a half-dozen times in a row. Despite the small space each murder takes place in, the fact that the puzzles are so simple means that even this is too large. About 66% of the games' rooms don't have any material relevance to [i]any[/i] murders. Paradoxically, this means most of the game, by volume, is walking around. I've seen some people say that TSB is meant to be an adventure game rather than a puzzler, but if that were the case then this issue would, in my opinion, go from being annoying to nigh-on unacceptable: in what world do I want my adventure game to mostly consist of mutely travelling back and forth through rooms which are, aside from the initial sweep of flavour text prompts, essentially empty space? Not being able to coexist in a room with somebody else adds a slight amount of complexity to proceedings, but that too becomes more tedious than threatening. The masks which give you abilities are also quite a let-down. They don't add any real substance to gameplay. Only the third is arguably an "ability" in the interesting sense. The first two come at the start and are essentially ubiquitous, the fourth and fifth are glorified progress gates, and the sixth one is purely for optional lore. There is a last ability that comes right at the end which could be more interesting, but by that point there isn't anything left to do. Ironically, if you removed the collectables that are gated behind these abilities, then they're predominantly used to leave the area where you got them. They don't add any dynamism to the situation, there's no reason not to use them when you can, and they mostly don't recontextualize previous locations with new possibilities. They feel hollow. [h2]The Sexy[/h2] I did mention that I was feeling conflicted on whether this should be positive or negative, so I want to temper this with some broad praise: [list] [*] The characters, though thin, are well-written. I often stuck around to see what people had to say to themselves and each other. [*] The art style is wonderful. The exaggerated, cartoony proportions are endearing. A terrifically vibrant colour palette, as well. [*] The UI is very helpful and intuitive. I never needed much of the information the game was able to convey to me - the puzzles were too simple - but I appreciate that it's there. This could have been the kind of thing that makes the game frustrating to play through, especially when time travel in involved, but it's evident a fair amount of thought and refinement went into how the game communicates with you. [*] The mansion, although underutilized, is fun to explore. [/list] I should emphasize; for all the game fails to capitalize on, the core experience is not bad. At a deep discount, I don't feel cheated of a game. It's elegantly presented and its narrative is fun. [h2]The Payout[/h2] I wish this game would have done more with its concept. I don't harbour any resentment towards my time with the game. I'd say I feel apathy above all else. I don't think I'll remember much of it for very long, however. Of that which [i]is[/i] present, not much is actually done poorly. Honestly, the biggest sin this game [b]actively[/b] commits is having some occasional framerate dips. I can't say I can recommend it, though. It's too big a letdown. The only thing left to ruminate on are the ghosts of what could have been.

Played it twice, both times didn't finish it. The gimmick is slightly too clunky and repetitive, and the game is just slightly too long.

A puzzle game with beautiful music and tension. I enjoyed the mystery and some moments did hit a little in the feels for me. Redd and Willow were two of my faves of the masked individuals, loved them both.

very solid story you can absorb yourself into over a week or so. I would tell you to just go in blind, but most people need enticing so I will run down the premise. You are trapped reliving the same day over and over, looping every midnight, in order to solve the various murders around the mansion. The staff of the mansion will kill every guest by midnight, unless you do something. You are the only person who knows what is about to happen. Using your time manipulation, you can look at things from different angles as you repeat the day, finding more clues and such, with the eventual goal of stopping whatever is going on. I think of all the games that deal with time loops this one is definitely the best. It's the perfect set up for a detective sort of game, and it's also just a good story honestly. Will not disappoint.