The Sexy Brutale

A cleverly plotted puzzle game wrapped in the cloak of a murder-mystery. It may be brief, but The Sexy Brutale will certainly deliver an unforgettable evening.

Amidst the glut of blockbusters at the start of 2017, The Sexy Brutale stands out as one of the most enjoyable and well-realised titles out there. Successfully evoking the feel of a classic adventure and combining it with a distinctive art style and beautiful music, it deserves to reach a wide audience. Its 8 hour playtime is consistently entertaining and full of intrigue and the final narrative payoff is satisfying. All in all, The Sexy Brutale is a perfect indie game to fill the gaps between the many sprawling epics that are demanding our gaming attention this year.

The Sexy Brutale is a very different type of game to anything on the PS4 currently, taking up a Groundhog Day-style in gameplay that is excellently executed. The game is perfectly presented with outstanding audio and visuals that are able to switch the tone of the story from being joyfully upbeat to a very dark within a matter of moments. The story does a great job of keeping you fixated on looking for answers from beginning to end and its conclusion will leave you more than satisfied with your time spent solving its interestingly intricate puzzles.

The Sexy Brutale is a highly unique game. It's like a Clue game, but the entire environment is a puzzle. We already know who the killer is, but we have to stop every murder. The art is gorgeous and it's a great start for Cavalier Game Studios.

The Sexy Brutale is a lavishly stylish, unique and engrossing murder mystery game in which, on a day that always restarts, you must prevent the staff of a grand mansion from murdering the several guests and solve the intriguing mystery.

The Sexy Brutale is a refreshing new take on the classic murder mystery genre. Throughout my journey of the mansion I went through many different emotions as I raced against the clock to save the guests from their unfortunate demise. The rather short campaign should not outweigh the brilliant music, gorgeous graphical style and unique game mechanics that make up The Sexy Brutale as a whole.

Awash in a frankly ridiculous amount of charm and bolstered by a genuinely innovative time travel mechanic, The Sexy Brutale is one of the most deliciously refreshing puzzlers to come along in a good long while.

Every murder The Sexy Brutale includes is uniquely fascinating to investigate, with the central loop of searching for clues and executing a plan to alter time continually engaging. I found Boone’s quest so fascinating, the Brutale’s secrets so alluring, and its world so charming that I rewound the clock just to spend a few more days in Lafcadio’s beautiful nightmare.

The Sexy Brutale is a very nice and original adventure game, that makes good use of a time loop in its core gameplay.

The Sexy Brutale's puzzles are fun enough, though they’re never precisely challenging. Instead, the game is likely best understood as an interactive art piece. Seen as such, it succeeds on almost all fronts. There's dramatic tension as you discover each of the gruesome ways your fellow guests meet their end in ever more fascinating wings of the mansion, and there's a dark commentary on the banality of death as you grow accustomed to using the sounds associated with specific murders in distant rooms as a form of a timer. Over and over again, The Sexy Brutale hammers home the brutal truth that you just can't save everyone.

All in all, the game does a phenomenal job of weaving its tale of murder thanks to a fascinating plot and riveting character interaction that kept me coming back for more. Even though the risk of annoyance thanks to repetition is high, players that love a good puzzle shouldn’t miss this one. The Sexy Brutale feels like a love letter to fans of classic Whodunit novels, and in my book, Lafcadio Boone’s adventure is a must-have addition to any Adventure player’s library.

Complex, challenging, but never boring, The Sexy Brutale blends a compelling narrative, appealing aesthetics and innovative gameplay into one stylish package.

The secret stories Father Lafcadio uncovers are lovely, but you won't always enjoy the process of uncovering them. Still, a series of elegant murders, with elegant stories, in an elegant mansion is enough to show anyone a good time.

An inspired mix of graphic adventure and Majora’s Mask style time travel, that offers some of the year’s most inspired puzzle-solving.

The Sexy Brutale is an original adventure puzzle game with a marvelous soundtrack. The game knows like surprise you with new gameplay mechanics and a interesting storyline.

When it comes to love letters to an era of gaming long since passed, you would be hard pressed to find something more heartfelt than The Sexy Brutale.

The Sexy Brutale is a game that stands out for the implementation of the temporary plane in its puzzles and for having a great atmosphere thanks to its soundtrack and its artistic design.

While there are a few minor technical problems, I haven't played a puzzle adventure game that's absorbed me like The Sexy Brutale has in a long time. A great story well worth telling.

The Sexy Brutale is a nice piece of art. Its artistic values are great, with amazing visuals and sound, and the story is amazing and charming. It's an interesting evolution of traditional point'n'click adventures.

It's one of the most original puzzle adventures we've played in a while, and although it's a very good game, it had potential to be even better.

While having a great premise, awesome music and quite good puzzles, there's simply way too much downtime in The Sexy Brutale. Moments when you can put your controller aside and do other stuff, while waiting for the hours to pass. A shame, since it's actually a really, really cool game.

The story understandingly loops, but the mechanics are frustratingly fixed, never really changing from those first 30 minutes.

Tequila Works and Cavalier Game Studios' joint work is an inconsistent game that highlights its artistic work and certain gameplay mechanics, but has its burdens in its less appealing controls and a really uninteresting plot. Being able to rewind time and trying to avoid crimes can lure some players, but it is an overall repetitive experience and this sort of board game doesn't amuse me as much as I would like it to.

The new Tequila Works and Cavalier Game Studios videogame is a mix of cinematic concepts like "Groundhog Day", with table games like Clue or 13 Dead End Drive. The plot is interesting but the technical execution, lack of depth and gameplay mechanics goes against the overall result.

But no mask – no matter how flamboyant – can fully hide The Sexy Brutale’s faults. [July 2017, p74]

A novel idea becomes a bland experience. [Issue#187, p.77]