The Sexy Brutale

Dead Again (and Again and Again)

- Martin Kitts

People who have worked in customer service for a living will probably be able to sympathise just a little with the staff of The Sexy Brutale, an exclusive mansion-casino where the servants have decided that enough is enough and that all of those annoying guests will have to be murdered.

But as priestly investigator Lafcadio Boone discovers, killing the guests just once isn’t enough for these guys. Instead they repeat the entire gory sequence over and over, looping from midday to midnight, with each guest suffering the same hideous demise at the exact same time. Lafcadio is the only person with any memory beyond this 12-hour period, but can his knowledge of events break the cycle?

It’s a concept that’s surprisingly absent from a lot of games. The sprawling, time-warping Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask might be the best known example, and the clockwork Groundhog Day of the recent Hitman is worth a mention, but both games have inherent issues with pacing that wouldn’t suit a shorter experience like The Sexy Brutale. There’s potentially a lot of waiting around for events to occur and, particularly in Zelda’s case, an overwhelming amount of stuff to keep track of. It’s not the most fun.

No time for love