You wake up in a strange mansion. You don’t know why or how you got there, but a pocket watch you’re holding tells you that it’s noon. A sudden announcement lets you know that a show is starting at 7:00 in the mansion’s theatre. This is the beginning of The Sexy Brutale, and you’ll get to know it well as you experience it over and over and over again.
See, The Sexy Brutale takes place over the course of 12 in-game hours in a Groundhog Day-style loop. You’re at a masquerade ball in a mansion, but things have taken a deadly turn: the staff of the mansion are murdering the guests. For whatever reason, you’ve been given the ability to experience the day repeatedly and try to prevent the murders.
You do so by exploring the mansion and observing pieces of each guest’s story. You can peer through keyholes to spy on scenes as they play out, but everything is happening in real time. If you know somebody is occupied in one room, you can use that to your advantage to sneak into another room undetected, or you can simply watch how things happen so that you have more information later.
For example, the first murder you see in the game involves one guest being killed with a hunting rifle. If you explore the rooms nearby, you can find the rifle before the killer does and replace the bullets with blanks. This will give the victim enough time to knock out his assailant before the murder can take place.
The key is making sure you see every piece of a scene before you try to change it. If you watch a murder play out from the victim’s perspective and then watch how the killer did it, you might find a way to foil the crime. But if you don’t have all of the pieces of the puzzle, you might actually make one guest’s situation worse in your attempts to save another. It’s a fragile game of dominos.
Each time you stop a murder, the guest will take off their mask (this is a masquerade ball, after all) and be free of the time loop they’ve been stuck in. As you save each would-be victim, you’ll keep their mask and earn an ability from it, which you’ll keep from that point forward. Accumulating new abilities gives you a sort of Metroidvania-style sense of exploration, as they allow you to start each day with a new power that will let you access a different part of the mansion or change the story in some way.
The Sexy Brutale is a smart, unique take on the Groundhog Day/Edge of Tomorrow time loop idea, and is unabashedly supernatural in a way that reminded me of Dishonored.
The demo shown at Gamescom was only the beginning of the game, but speaking to co-developers TequilaWorks (the studio also making Rime) and Cavalier (which includes former members of Fable developer Lionhead), it’s clear that there are plenty of exciting ideas in the works to mix things up. The Sexy Brutale could be something very special if all of the pieces fall into place.
The Sexy Brutale is currently aiming for an early 2017 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and wishes the day he visited a cat cafe was his Groundhog Day loop. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter.
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