I usually find it quite simple to read out my plaudits and detractions for a game, being that the personal proof of experience, which isn’t to say objective fact but perspective solidified, is able to grasped by something so plain as, “the jumping mechanics feel bad to me because this repetitious action hadst be performed with this infelicitous navigation of physics, physical manipulation, and physical space, which sums herein endlessly to this reified proof.” There are always people who can, by their own personal experience, take those exact parts and make the claim opposite to yours, and sometimes with adequate persuasion and passion in turn reveal an underlying gratification that went uninvestigated in the personal play which led to the negative expression in the first place; I think this is, for many people, the experience of games such as Rain World or Loom (or Bioshock Infinite if one is to look at this process mirrored). This is a foible of design, but it’s quasi-state is part of what makes game design, and games criticism, such a delightful pairing in the medium: the experience is shown to be as interpretable as any classical text, yet has a greater breadth of variation than most static art objects. Sometimes designers produce things which are taken on their face as they are hoped; sometimes they are taken as done poorly the thing which the game rebuked is in itself rebuking; sometimes the game stumbles ass backward into a rebuke that is taken as sincere by players that the developer did poorly: the critical masses will accumulate, discourse, and try to win out all varying ‘proofs’ - and although there will never be a truth utterly determined in it, a great deal of beautiful things will be said, and a great deal of games will have promoted those beauteous statements with obvious stimuli.

The Sexy Brutale seems to me, and being such as it is, makes it difficult for me to read out my feelings with exactitude, a type of game which has that solidified perspective by design of the devs to be creating all components poorly to produce a poor thing so as to rebuke… the idea of logical deduction? Detection as a mechanic? Cohesive level design or play feel? It’s difficult to say; the murky sloppiness all comes across as very intentional, and the intentional outcome seems to be nothing less than arduous gawking at the stupidity of figuration, but that is so counter to the ideals of indie game development that it feels wrong to add it all up to pure pissantery from the devs to the players. Typically, or at least in the games which have come to rest at an upper register of indiedom, these smaller projects interpose a vision of an undug mechanical or thematic interaction that has glinted in the past mass excavations of AAA games, something which has hinted at complex degree but has only been used to forward a bland, unexamined platter of all flavours unsettled by mutual orgy between them. Such is this the tutorialising in Cultist Simulator, the scene to scene editing in 30 Flights, or the ‘difficulty’ in Getting Over It. What completely confuses me in The Sexy Brutale is its seeming garmenting of the syllogisms quietly supposed to systems of inquiry in games like Witcher 3 or L.A. Noire, which will proclaim detectives of the cast and the player but lead unto all discovery the play by way of checkmarks and button prompts. It brings this insulting brand of irrigation towards deductive fruiting, rightfully pointing out that for detection to be a game model, the player must be able to detect that which does not control their FOV, and instead of implementing a model of true P.I. playing, says “fuck it! why should any deduction be a trail of clues leading unto a discovery?” None of the murders solved herein are in any way characterised by intentions, by predilections of the character, nor by circumstances which they implicate themselves in unintentionally: they are instead rube goldberg contraptions that an askew painting starts and a rogue skewering magic routine ends. It has long been said that a good mystery will have its pieces laid out for the audience, and instead of assuming that those pieces should fit together into a picture of what occurred, the devs of Brutale thought they could just scatter those pieces across a mansion so that they might be assembled into a vorticist portrait of Sherlock’s member.

My other complaints are those which are obvious and presumably not contentious: the movement speed of the player is far too slow, the time travel mechanic is ridiculous and poorly implemented given how the devs lay out their world, the UI is counterintuitive to both typical conventions and the game’s own accommodations, and the horrible parody of cabaret from the 1920s is sickeningly uninvestigated (which I suppose reinforces the thumb up ass method of digging around) and kind of insulting in how its pastiche pays no homage whatsoever to the roots of how those aesthetics came to be, and how they ended up being ushered out by right wing populisms across the globe in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.