Designing for a schedule, Part II
Now that I’ve finished The Sexy Brutale, like to talk about my thoughts on the game, what my expectations were met with, and where schedule design could go on the future.
But before that, I want to say that the game was a success and you should consider buying it! The gaudily styled art is quite fantastic, being holistically cohesive and well populated, and is complimented by the bouncy sound track you can’t help but move along to. It uses mechanics you won’t often find elsewhere, and deals maturely with dark themes like gambling addiction (which should come as no surprise in a game set in a casino mansion). The rest of this article will deal with some spoilers, so if you want time to finish this 9 hour game, this is your exit!
Back? Still here? Either way, let’s dive in.
As stated earlier, The Sexy Brutale has few main mechanics that serve to interact with characters on their schedules. These are, basically: to observe NPCs, and to manipulate objects that NPCs interact with on the course of their schedule. This manipulation mostly involves set elements or the use of objects in your inventory.
Point and Click Done Right
First, I want to talk about what this game did well. Mechanically, the game is simple but offers some variety in how you can approach problems. This is a game primarily about observing non-player characters, and you have 4 ways to do so: by peeking through keyholes, listening at doors, hiding in the room, and observing from another floor (except in the bell tower). They have their pluses and minuses: peeking has a vision cone that may conceal the location and identity of some speakers, listening reveals all speakers’ locations but not their identity, hiding in the room can only be done before other characters enter, and observing from requires you to be far away and at times have no good way of reaching the people in a conversation and following them.
Certain points in the game are gated expertly. The tutorial segment for example, is one of the most elegant I have played in years. The game introduces piece by piece the most essential elements of the game: following characters, observing how they are killed, and intervening to stop it by manipulating items and the environment. Although you watch the same scene of a character getting murdered 3 times, each time feels markedly different: the first is a new experience, the second is a surprise as they game restarted the day for you, and the player can prevent the NPC’s death on the third sequence.
Room For Improvement
However, I think some facets of the game could be improved to provide a better experience. For example, the player’s method of observation is almost not a choice. Hiding in the room is almost always the ideal option should it be available: if you are tailing an NPC you will catch up with them more quickly and you have unlimited hearing and vision within the room. Peeking through a keyhole is superior to listening since you can almost always see who is talking (oddly enough the one exception I can think of is in the introduction). The game provides some information that is hidden unless the player is using the improved listening power, but since you can do this while peeking even this is not a reason to listen at doorways instead. The one time a player would be inclined to listen is at green doors (which have no keyhole) but strangely these doors never conceal conversations with any real information. These mechanics could have been explored by requiring the player to figure out the identity of NPCs they can only listen to or NPCs they can hear but can’t see through keyholes, and by making the choice of which door they listen or peek from matter. Additionally, observing NPCs is much easier than it could have otherwise been: there are few puzzles that involve making an unobservable room observable.
While in some ways the gating helps the player learn the game, in other ways it felt limiting and artificial. Rather than be tools in your arsenal of skills, many abilities the player gains are simply upgrades and may not even recontextualize their environment. For example, the second ability is the ability to listen better at doors by holding the spacebar. Not only is there not a reason to listen better all the time, but the player can easily have gotten that far in the game without having ever seen a conversation that needed additional scrutiny.
One design choice that I’m not particularly a fan of is the total inability to interact with characters in the same room. You can’t speak to characters, ask them questions, or show them items. This feels especially odd as every character is surprised or even delighted as they recognize the player character, Lafcadio, after you save them. It limits the amount of information that can be dispensed to the player and the ways it can be given, and feels quite odd as the characters you attempt to save essentially try to kill you as you walk into the room.
Puzzle Design (puzzle spoilers ahead)
For many games like The Sexy Brutale, this is what makes or breaks the game. TSB has some hits and some misses.
One issue with a game about observing characters’ schedules is evading the use of expository dialogue. Many times in the game, NPCs will simply say things that are almost directly for the player to solve a puzzle, rather than being tied into the world. In the 5th puzzle, the player is privy to information by listening to these two goons, who discuss the unlocking mechanism for a lethal trap:
In the context of the conversation, there’s little reason to believe the other goon wouldn’t know this. This solution is then fed to the player, making its execution a formality, and a slow one at that as this conversation occurs inconveniently before the 8 o’clock mark which the player can effectively start the day at.
Compare this to the far better 4th puzzle, in which the player must trap a nefarious musician in a room to save his unwary victim. If he begins his recital with his victim, she will die. However, when the player observes him rehearsing beforehand, something happens:
The musician hears an obnoxious record player 2 rooms away, and goes to investigate so he can turn the darn thing off. Upon getting there he confiscates the record and returns to his dastardly business. After seeing this the first time, the player can take advantage of their knowledge: another record player lies nearby in a closet that can be locked from the outside, and further exploration reveals the treble-clef on top of the piano that can lock the closet from the outside! If the player swaps the record before the villain investigates, he will wander into the closet allowing the player to grab the key, lock him in, and save the girl. What makes this better is that the player isn’t just told what to do: they have to figure it out on their own, and this “ah ha!” moment is the best kind of satisfaction in puzzle design. I should note that for some reason, the piano player can only hear the obnoxious record at the same specific time on each day, despite the fact that the closet shares a wall with the piano room, and that he can even walk into the room with the still-playing record in its closet and not observe it.
Finally, I think there was room for puzzles that really pushed the player’s knowledge of the environment and schedules, but I don’t feel like these puzzles were present. Puzzles are largely contained in small subsections of the mansion and require no interaction with previously explored areas. Only one puzzle toward the end of the game really takes place over very many sections of the house, after which The Sexy Brutale relaxes into a more narrative heavy end game (with a strong pay-off). Many puzzles in the game proudly announce their failure state to the entire mansion: a gunshot herald’s Sixpence’s death, the lights short as Redd is electrocuted, and so on. This information, while well delivered, serves no gameplay purpose as one can only recognize these events after experiencing them, and there is no need to plan a route to save multiple (or all) guests: the game even showed this happening in the end sequence, to my dismay.
All in all, I think The Sexy Brutale introduced some cool new ideas into schedule based games, and that any game seeking to deliver on similar mechanics would to well to see what The Sexy Brutale has to offer. In particular I think such games would to well to explore the mechanical affordances of this game’s spying mechanics, and to expect more extensive deduction on the part of the player.
