Groundhog's Day loops are my pet genre. I absolutely love the concept and find it criminally underused in fiction. How excited was I then to find The Sexy Brutale, a well received game consisting of a time loop where you must save 9 individuals from their seemingly inevitable murder. Majora's Mask was an obvious inspiration, as in addition to loops masks also play a large part in the game. The visuals are nice and detailed well enough to make the mansion interesting to explore and the music is very good with audio cues from certain events being audible from anywhere in the mansion at the appropriate times. However, as an execution of the time loop concept, I find this game to be a massive failure.
First I will talk about how the mechanics and how they fail to utilize the time loop concept with minor spoilers, and then I will discuss the story with full spoilers.
The deaths are all isolated to their own little wing of the mansion and the guests almost never interact with each other except those that are saved in pairs. I can think of one occasion where there is a conversation between two guests who are not part of the same puzzle. What kind of lame party is this, anyway? Everybody is off doing their own thing the whole night! In addition, when you solve a puzzle the game jumps to the time that the murder would have occurred, plays a cutscene, and then resets the day. This means that one of the main fascinations of the time loop concept for me is completely absent: "what if I had done things differently?" There is no opportunity to experiment with how changing earlier events affects later events or to play with different permutations of events. In theory saving a guest should have ramifications, they would then be free to interact with other guests, or to get into more trouble later on, or make different options possible, but because nothing that happens in the mansion affects anything else, none of this is ever possible.
The fact that time jumps when you solve the puzzle may be one of the biggest betrayals of the concept in the game. If the focus of your game is that you are working against a rigid schedule of events that all take place after a set amount of real time, the worst thing you can do is to make arbitrary skips in time. It takes away any impact the clock has and makes the world feel fake. Why did I just lose 4 hours? Did my character just stand there the whole time? The only time time should skip is if the player does a voluntary action to forward time, or if the player character is incapacitated somehow. Resetting time early, likewise robs the setting of it's verisimilitude. You can never see the ramifications of your actions, even if you should be able to within the loops rules.
Another major problem is that the puzzles are far too easy. Most people will probably only require one rewind for most puzzles, if even that. I took longer, just because I wanted to follow everyone to hear all the dialogue, but the solutions are trivial right up to the end. There are usually only 2 or 3 items in each area and the interaction points are similarly scant. There simply aren't enough options to be able to be wrong. To make matters worse, there is no final puzzle that brings everything together. The game clearly seems to be building up to one final run where you put it all together and save everyone in one night. Toward the end you get "fast travel," all guest movements are revealed to you, and the mansion FINALLY opens up. Nothing ever comes of it, however. This is a real shame because another fascinating thing about time loops is being able to use your repeated experience to basically become a god and be able to live a perfect day. To use your foreknowledge and practice to know just where to be and what to do to make the impossible possible. But this isn't utilized in the game, in fact, you cannot even attempt it because the game resets after you save a single person.
As an aside, I just want to talk about how awful the "fast travel" system is. You unlock it near the end and it let's you walk into any of the six(I think?) mirrors in the mansion and then you go to the worst hub ever. The hub consists of four rooms with 1 or 2 mirrors each separated by four long hallways, with no indication of which mirror leads to which part of the mansion. So if you want to fast travel, you need to remember where the closest mirror is, run to it, run all around the square hub until you find the mirror you need, then run to where you want to go. Most of the time I found it was just faster to ignore the mirrors and run straight where I needed to be.
Masks were also a very poorly implemented feature, despite being such a prominent focus. It's nothing like Majora's Mask, where switching between different masks was vital to gameplay, story, and sidequests. Here it's just a wrapping for acquiring new powers and has no impact or relevance beyond that. The mask is just absorbed into your own mask, and that's the end of it. Almost all of the mask powers are contextual button presses to open various forms of barriers to boot.
Okay now it's time to talk about the story so [HEADING=1] **ENDING SPOILERS**[/HEADING]
The end just sucks! It was some sort of dream, hallucination, or metaphor the whole time? What the heck!? I came here for a time loop! There are precious few games that focus on time loops and then they have to go and fall back on hackneyed story convention #4: it was all a dream! I feel betrayed!
The time loop concept doesn't even work with this idea, or it meshes clumsily at best. So Lucas is punishing himself by imagining himself murdering his friends in ways more horrible than they actually died. He is changing their murders slightly from time to time to make himself feel worse. This is not what is represented by a time loop where things happen the same way every day. The time loop establishes something concrete. That at 12:57 Reginald Sixpence will enter the office, he will open the safe at 1:16, and will be murdered by 2 of diamonds at exactly 3:45. It's precise. Fixed. It will happen exactly that way, every cycle, unless the player interferes. There are even the audio cues letting you know that the events are still happening in the other parts of the mansion at their respective times. And this is supposed to be the representation of the imaginings of a madman, torturing himself with fake memories out of guilt? I just can't buy it, it doesn't work like that. Nobody could be so precise.
There was no point to saving anybody, because they were all already dead, and died in a completely different manner than the murders we were preventing. It was pointless on top of the already pointlessness of saving them in a time loop. We are so far removed from the reality of what happened that our actions have no relevance except as some incredibly abstract metaphor. The mask powers were pointless as well.
And what the heck was he thinking? Insurance fraud... WITH DYNAMITE!? "Oh yes, you see it was a complete accident! Everybody in the whole mansion decided to get out for some fresh air and a midnight stroll and then the whole place just EXPLODED. Can't imagine why. Must have been a gas leak. I couldn't have been involved, I was outside too!"
Ridiculous! And I can't imagine what kind of premiums he would be paying on a place like that! The place must be worth over half a billion dollars with all the priceless treasures he had hoarded. How could he possible get something like that insured?
In the end it feels like a bait and switch. I came for a time loop where I stop everybody getting murdered with my time powers, but the game turned into a recurring dream where I give up and accept that they are all already dead. The mechanics were badly implemented for a time loop game, but I guess it doesn't even matter in the end because it wasn't actually one to begin with.
First I will talk about how the mechanics and how they fail to utilize the time loop concept with minor spoilers, and then I will discuss the story with full spoilers.
The deaths are all isolated to their own little wing of the mansion and the guests almost never interact with each other except those that are saved in pairs. I can think of one occasion where there is a conversation between two guests who are not part of the same puzzle. What kind of lame party is this, anyway? Everybody is off doing their own thing the whole night! In addition, when you solve a puzzle the game jumps to the time that the murder would have occurred, plays a cutscene, and then resets the day. This means that one of the main fascinations of the time loop concept for me is completely absent: "what if I had done things differently?" There is no opportunity to experiment with how changing earlier events affects later events or to play with different permutations of events. In theory saving a guest should have ramifications, they would then be free to interact with other guests, or to get into more trouble later on, or make different options possible, but because nothing that happens in the mansion affects anything else, none of this is ever possible.
The fact that time jumps when you solve the puzzle may be one of the biggest betrayals of the concept in the game. If the focus of your game is that you are working against a rigid schedule of events that all take place after a set amount of real time, the worst thing you can do is to make arbitrary skips in time. It takes away any impact the clock has and makes the world feel fake. Why did I just lose 4 hours? Did my character just stand there the whole time? The only time time should skip is if the player does a voluntary action to forward time, or if the player character is incapacitated somehow. Resetting time early, likewise robs the setting of it's verisimilitude. You can never see the ramifications of your actions, even if you should be able to within the loops rules.
Another major problem is that the puzzles are far too easy. Most people will probably only require one rewind for most puzzles, if even that. I took longer, just because I wanted to follow everyone to hear all the dialogue, but the solutions are trivial right up to the end. There are usually only 2 or 3 items in each area and the interaction points are similarly scant. There simply aren't enough options to be able to be wrong. To make matters worse, there is no final puzzle that brings everything together. The game clearly seems to be building up to one final run where you put it all together and save everyone in one night. Toward the end you get "fast travel," all guest movements are revealed to you, and the mansion FINALLY opens up. Nothing ever comes of it, however. This is a real shame because another fascinating thing about time loops is being able to use your repeated experience to basically become a god and be able to live a perfect day. To use your foreknowledge and practice to know just where to be and what to do to make the impossible possible. But this isn't utilized in the game, in fact, you cannot even attempt it because the game resets after you save a single person.
As an aside, I just want to talk about how awful the "fast travel" system is. You unlock it near the end and it let's you walk into any of the six(I think?) mirrors in the mansion and then you go to the worst hub ever. The hub consists of four rooms with 1 or 2 mirrors each separated by four long hallways, with no indication of which mirror leads to which part of the mansion. So if you want to fast travel, you need to remember where the closest mirror is, run to it, run all around the square hub until you find the mirror you need, then run to where you want to go. Most of the time I found it was just faster to ignore the mirrors and run straight where I needed to be.
Masks were also a very poorly implemented feature, despite being such a prominent focus. It's nothing like Majora's Mask, where switching between different masks was vital to gameplay, story, and sidequests. Here it's just a wrapping for acquiring new powers and has no impact or relevance beyond that. The mask is just absorbed into your own mask, and that's the end of it. Almost all of the mask powers are contextual button presses to open various forms of barriers to boot.
Okay now it's time to talk about the story so [HEADING=1] **ENDING SPOILERS**[/HEADING]
The end just sucks! It was some sort of dream, hallucination, or metaphor the whole time? What the heck!? I came here for a time loop! There are precious few games that focus on time loops and then they have to go and fall back on hackneyed story convention #4: it was all a dream! I feel betrayed!
The time loop concept doesn't even work with this idea, or it meshes clumsily at best. So Lucas is punishing himself by imagining himself murdering his friends in ways more horrible than they actually died. He is changing their murders slightly from time to time to make himself feel worse. This is not what is represented by a time loop where things happen the same way every day. The time loop establishes something concrete. That at 12:57 Reginald Sixpence will enter the office, he will open the safe at 1:16, and will be murdered by 2 of diamonds at exactly 3:45. It's precise. Fixed. It will happen exactly that way, every cycle, unless the player interferes. There are even the audio cues letting you know that the events are still happening in the other parts of the mansion at their respective times. And this is supposed to be the representation of the imaginings of a madman, torturing himself with fake memories out of guilt? I just can't buy it, it doesn't work like that. Nobody could be so precise.
There was no point to saving anybody, because they were all already dead, and died in a completely different manner than the murders we were preventing. It was pointless on top of the already pointlessness of saving them in a time loop. We are so far removed from the reality of what happened that our actions have no relevance except as some incredibly abstract metaphor. The mask powers were pointless as well.
And what the heck was he thinking? Insurance fraud... WITH DYNAMITE!? "Oh yes, you see it was a complete accident! Everybody in the whole mansion decided to get out for some fresh air and a midnight stroll and then the whole place just EXPLODED. Can't imagine why. Must have been a gas leak. I couldn't have been involved, I was outside too!"
Ridiculous! And I can't imagine what kind of premiums he would be paying on a place like that! The place must be worth over half a billion dollars with all the priceless treasures he had hoarded. How could he possible get something like that insured?
In the end it feels like a bait and switch. I came for a time loop where I stop everybody getting murdered with my time powers, but the game turned into a recurring dream where I give up and accept that they are all already dead. The mechanics were badly implemented for a time loop game, but I guess it doesn't even matter in the end because it wasn't actually one to begin with.
