Video Game / The Sexy Brutale

"Time to move on, old man. Never take your mask off. It will give you a chance. Just a chance. You are not weak. And I will help you."

"The Marquis is the enigmatic owner and creator of The Sexy Brutale casino mansion. Every year he throws an extravagant masked ball for a select party of guests. His impeccably trained staff cater to their every desire. But this year, something is terribly, terribly...Wrong. The guests aren't getting what they want AT ALL."

The Sexy Brutale is a Puzzle-Adventure Game developed by Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works. It was released on April 12, 2017 on the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game was also released for Nintendo Switch on December 7 of the same year.

You play as Lafcadio Boone, an elderly priest who wakes up in the lavish confines of a casino mansion known as The Sexy Brutale. Every year, the mysterious owner of The Sexy Brutale throws an elaborate Masquerade Ball for a privileged few. However, this time something very sinister is afoot, and over the course of twelve hours the masked staff of the casino murder all ten guests.

Marked by a mysterious blood-soaked woman, Lafcadio discovers that he has gained the power to travel back in time to the beginning of this most gruesome night. Unable to intervene directly, Lafcadio must lurk around the vacant rooms, eavesdrop on the victims and killers, and find ways to sabotage the murder attempts without being seen. If he is able to do that, then maybe he can figure out just what is going on.

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This video game provides examples of:

• All Men Are Perverts: Specifically the ghosts, and it's justified since nobody can see or hear them. Most of them seem perverted particularly toward Tequila Belle and Willow Blue. There's a large number of ghosts where Tequila is or would be, such as the music rooms and theater. It's implied that Willow was in the library on Saturday morning, where there's another ghost complaining about the lack of smut. Moreover, one ghost rummages through Willow's room for naughty material and then Willow has to tell him off for trying to feel up Tequila.
• All Webbed Up: This is Trinity's fate if you don't interfere.
• Anti-Frustration Features: While many of the cards fall under Guide Dang It!, the game does at least provide one (slightly non-obvious) way to reduce the frustration of finding the last few: The most difficult cards to find also unlock room descriptions from the area where they're found, and viewing the list of room descriptions shows which cards unlock which ones, so you can use that to figure out the general location of the more hard-to-find cards, if you've missed any. Unfortunately, only some of the cards unlock descriptions and the player might disagree about which are the most difficult to find.
• Awesome McCoolname: The titular mansion is named thus because it sounds "glamorous."
• "Balls" Gag: Trinity does this twice at the start of the afternoon, which is appropriate since she was trying to play the roulette wheel. First, she asks the staff member "Are you going to drop it in or are you going to fondle that ball all day?" After he drops it and the ball rolls away, she tells Clay "Someone dropped the ball on that one."
  • The description of The Ball Room mentions the Marquis's pride in having "the biggest balls around", a comment his wife abhors.
  • There is also a slant variety. The secret path hidden in the library is, naturally hidden behind a bookshelf. You open it by "pulling out the Balzac".
• Bilingual Bonus: 'Aurum' is Latin for 'Gold'. Aurum Runes is a goldsmith.
• Bittersweet Ending: You have the chance to forgive yourself and move on. Even though you save all the guests' lives, it's purely metaphorical. They all died in the fire years ago.
• Bizarrchitecture: Especially in the basement, where there's a graveyard in the open air, a giant record player, and a bottomless room full of stacks upon stacks of playing cards. There's also a bottomless belfry in the same story as the guestrooms.
• Black Comedy: Primarily provided by the staff, who carry out their murders with the phlegmatic, casual attitude they might have towards washing dishes. Mood Whiplash is also used to full effect.
• Bloody Handprint: The Bloody Girl marks Lafcadio's white mask like this at the start of the game. In this instance, it's meant as a protection against the titular mansion's specific "defense mechanisms".
• Body Horror: The Bloody Girl has no skin, and her hair is a fountain of blood.
• Bookcase Passage: What one of the secret passages uses as its cover. Also, a hidden panel necessary to save one of the guests' lives is hidden behind a bookcase.
• Brick Joke: After murdering Sixpence, Two Diamonds complains about the absence of Seven Clubs. Much later you can find out what Seven Clubs is actually doing — he's playing piano for Tequila, and perfectly happy he's not anywhere near the chapel.
• Bumbling Henchman Duo: Nine Hearts and Nine Spades, who never leave each others' sides the whole evening, and whose conversations usually take the form of a one or two-word question followed by a similarly short answer.
  • …up until the point where Nine Hearts' insistence to double check the off switch for the theatre cage causes Nine Spades to blow up at him. See Suddenly Shouting below.
    King Clubs: You two give me a bloody headache. You both sound so weird, ALL the time.
• But Thou Must!: If you want to finish the game, you need to forgive yourself and let go. Choosing the other option just forces you to go through the final few scenes of the climax again and doesn't show either an ending or the credits.
• The Butler Did It: Just about the only deaths that aren't directly or indirectly caused by the staff are Willow and Lucas.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Almost all of the staff seem to take some level of satisfaction from killing the guests, ranging from proud to perverse. Probably best exemplified by their boss, Golden Skull, who is not only responsible, but freely and proudly admits to being a murderer and a bad person.
  Three Hearts: It's days like this when it's great to be alive… and a total bastard.
• Cerebus Retcon: You can be easily forgiven for thinking that the bell ringing at 7pm is to signify the much-ballyhooed show in the theater at 7 is starting. You later learn that it's Willow hanging herself. Whether or not the timing is a coincidence is up for debate.
• Character Tic:
  • Whenever Lafcadio hides, he crosses himself before shutting the doors. He also does so as one of his idle animations. Lucas does the same gesture before jumping out of the burning clock tower, for a bit of subtle foreshadowing.
  • Greyson strokes his beard when he's thinking.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Both the spinner statue arm and the hungry charm can be used for things other than the sequences they first appear in.
• Cool Mask: Not only are the masks themselves cool, but Lafcadio can borrow the owners' talents by putting them on.
• Concealing Canvas: What stately manor would be complete without them? Even lampshaded at one point:
  Greyson: Ah HA! Oh Thanos… So predictable. I can just imagine him now— so pleased with himself… HIDING A SAFE BEHIND A PICTURE! WHAT AN IDEA! NO YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPER WOULD EVER THINK OF IT!
• Closed Circle: Lafcadio notes that there's a wall of smooth marble where the front door should be in the main lobby.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: There are your usual causes of death, like gunshots, but then there's…
  • Clay. He drinks spider venom so potent that before he's even dead it's melted the flesh away from his mouth.
  • Trinity. Eaten by a giant spider.
  • Tequila. Fatally lacerated by a window that she shattered when her singing voice hit a high note.
  • Greyson. Crushed by Spikes of Doom inside a Faraday Cage, bound via a Clutching Hand Trap so he can't escape through the trap door.
• Curse Cut Short: While tamer swear words are frequent, both Greyson and Thanos get a Precision F-Strike that's cut short.
• Dance Party Ending: As part of the secret ending, which requires you to find all of the 52 cards and give them to the 'Old Habits' demon in the hidden room of the Casino. This ends with a dance party because it symbolizes Lucas returning to his gambling addiction, seeking escapism and hedonism as an alternative to coping with or tormenting himself over the deaths of his friends and family.
• Deaf Composer: Trinity Carrington, the blind master sculptress.
• Diegetic Switch: For the most part, the music hall's soundtrack consists of songs being played by record players, staff members, or Tequila.
• Door to Before: The player will frequently find hidden passages behind paintings that allow them access to a previous area of the mansion.
• Dramatic Unmask: Golden Skull, the staff, and Lafcadio all take off their masks in the game's finale, and their identities are revealed to be Lucas Bondes himself.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: There's an alternate ending that answers nothing and gives little closure, in which Lucas falls back into his gambling addiction. To get this ending, you need to collect an entire deck of cards scattered throughout the mansion, some of which get destroyed if you don't get to them quickly enough. This is considerably more difficult than just playing through the story. At the end of that ending, he shatters the glass window in the back with his voice, but whether this symbolizes him eventually escaping from that mindless hedonism, simply suffering deep inside forever, or something else is unclear.
• The Ending Changes Everything: Once you really know what's going on in the mansion, a lot of incidental details and descriptions suddenly make a lot more sense or take on a whole new meaning. See Foreshadowing, Meaningful Background Event, and Motif.
  • The fact that impending danger manifests itself as tongues of flame around your mask, the blue fire that bars you from entering certain doors for most of the game and the fire symbol on said doors, the flames that surround the pocket watch when the time approaches midnight, the hell motifs in the Heaven & Hell rooms, the playing cards that are singed and show smoke residue. Even the description of the first fireplace in the first room of the game: "The fire is roaring. Its intensity causes your heart to race."
  • The dining hall being set so early. Since everyone's already dead and Lucas once jokes about holding a "dumb supper," it's a reference to a tradition in Samhain where a place would be set during feasts for the dead returning home so they can join the meal.
  • Why the murders are happening in the first place. Lucas is reminding himself that he accidentally murdered everyone he cared about; making the Guests die every loop keeps this guilt fresh and raw.
  • The masks of the Guests chasing and hurting Lafcadio when he enters the same room as them. The memories of his dearest friends will overwhelm Lucas unless he gets away, essentially dodging the subject because it's too painful to think about.
  • When you use a mask ability, the specific mask appears in the top-left corner of the screen. When an enemy mask is chasing you, the top-left of the screen shows Lafcadio's mask.
• Empathic Environment: After the last murder has taken place and the clock is approaching midnight, it begins to rain indoors.
• Enemy Within: Near the ending, this is revealed to be the case for Golden Skull and the staff he commands. Golden Skull is in reality the representation of the part of Lucas' psyche that refuses to forgive himself for accidentally killing his friends, wife, and unborn child. With the aid of the staff (which are also in reality extensions of Lucas' psyche), Golden Skull has been torturing Lucas' mind for years by constantly replaying an embellished version of the very day Lucas killed everyone. As a part of Lucas, Golden Skull refuses to let Lucas forgive himself and/or forget his sin.
• Evil Is Visceral: Inverted. The Bloody Girl has no skin and is constantly oozing blood. However, she's kind and compassionate, giving you her handprint which separated you from the time loop in the first place, and she's the only one trying to help you save everyone. On the other hand, The Golden Skull is thoroughly evil, but he wears a fancy, shiny mask, red gloves, and an impeccably fancy white suit.
• Expressive Mask: The masks that the staff wear cover their entire head, but the face section moves and emotes. The same goes for Thanos's mask.
• Failed a Spot Check: Inverted for Trinity, who has a special hearing ability and notices Tequila's body immediately, but after saving Clay and Trinity, neither of them comment on or seem to notice Tequila's corpse. This is justified as taking off their masks makes them forget what just happened, like Sixpence forgetting he killed the staff member.
• Fatal Flaw: This is inverted for most of the guests. It's their virtues that get them killed, such as Redd's loyalty to Greyson, Willow's bravery to fight for Tequila, or Thanos's trust in Aurum. Played straight in the case of Clay's gambling and drinking, as well as Greyson's greediness and obsession with the Moloch Egg.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: The tolling of a bell can be heard throughout the mansion at 7:00 PM, signifying Willow Blue hanging herself.
• Foreshadowing:
  • At noon, the speakers announce that "The Marquis invites you to tonight's show! 7 P.M. in the theater!" This foreshadows one of the locations you go through, as well as the significance of the show being where Greyson and Redd die.
  • Foreshadowing The Reveal:
    • On the cover and main menu screen, the background behind the characters looks like the sun shining behind clouds. This references the fire that burned down the casino as what actually is on the cover and main menu is smoke illuminated by the flames below. Also, Lafcadio is depicted as a pawn in Lucas's hand. This is because he's not actually Lafcadio, but rather an aspect of Lucas that he — as the player — controls, whereas the other aspects of Lucas are outside of his — and therefore the player's — control.
    • Sixpence's behavior in the chapel. He's desperately looking for something, warns the staff member something will happen if Sixpence dies, and cries out "Lucas! What have you done!" Moreover, after he is saved, he calls the staff member a "coward" for no perceiveable reason. The staff member is also Lucas, who blames himself personally for killing his friends. The hallucinated Sixpence is calling the real Lucas a coward.
    • After saving Tequila, Lafcadio plays the song Lucas had Tequila write for Eleanor. When she says Eleanor will love hearing the song, Lafcadio presses his hands against his face as if he's crying, further foreshadowing his identity as Lucas.
    • Casino ledgers appear several times throughout the game, often where one wouldn't expect to see them, but particularly noteworthy is the secret passage between the bar and the theater. This one has two sets of ledgers — one presumably being the actual figures, which show the Sexy Brutale for the money pit that it is, and the other being "adjusted" to hide that.
    • In the dining room, Eleanor is seated next to Lafcadio, and her husband, Lucas, does not have a seat. This foreshadows Lafcadio's true identity as Lucas himself. Alternatively, since the meal is one for the dead, it could foreshadow the fact that Lucas survived, whereas the real Lafcadio died.
    • The brochure entry for the Hunting Room in the chapel states that Lucas thought "exposing himself to the grief and pain was the only thing he believed gave so many unnecessary deaths at his hand any meaning," which both foreshadows the reveal and helps explain why there is so much effort put into the hallucination. Lucas is intentionally putting himself through this in order to make amends with those he killed.
    • At 4:15, you can hear the sound of glass breaking no matter where you are in the mansion, and if you are in the ballroom, you can see something or someone dropping from the sky. If your mind is set on saving everyone, you'll think it is one of the guests being pushed to their death, and you'll get to saving them eventually. In a way, it is, but not in the way you think. That person falling is Lucas Bondes — the Marquis — and he is the only one whose tragedy is not altered in some way — as well as the last person you'll "save".
    • When talking to Grinmaw, he calls you "Lafcadio", as if being sarcastic, hinting that this is not your real identity.
    • The game places particular emphasis on the fireplaces, with each one getting lit by a staff member at some point in the game even though they have no connection to any of the murders and no obvious significance beyond some of them containing cards. This is because in the real world, the fireplaces are where Lucas set the bombs that set the mansion on fire and killed everyone.
• Gargle Blaster: The What's Your Poison bar, which specializes in serving cocktails with a dash of venom from various dangerous animals. Supposedly, this gives the drink lots of "kick" and "flavour". And this was before they were actually trying to kill everyone.
• The Ghost: Lucas and Eleanor. They're not among the other guests, and the guests repeatedly remark that Lucas' absence in particular is unusual. Or at least they're this from the perspective of the guests and from what the player knows at first. In reality, they are the very first characters you see. The Bloody Lady is Eleanor — though her earlier, more normal self also appears late in the game — and Lucas is the player, the staff, Golden Skull, and technically everyone else as well. As with Eleanor, a "proper" Lucas also appears at the climax.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The basis for the entire game. Where it differs from other users of this trope is that you can't directly intervene in the events that unfold. The others can't see you and you can't interact with them. So while this does have the advantage of not having to worry about staff members chasing you or trying to kill you, it means every loop plays out exactly the same every time unless you prevent one of the murders. Even then, time resets immediately afterwards, so you don't get to see how things would've played out differently. The Bloody Girl implies that sticking around to find out would be a very bad idea, so it's probably for the best.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The curtains surrounding Greyson's cage close just as the spikes descend on him. When they open again, Greyson is dead.
• Guide Dang It!: The gameplay, story, and collecting most of the cards is fairly easily figured out just by playing the game, but some of the cards are hidden in less-than clear locations.
• Inciting Incident: None of the events in the game would have happened had Lucas told Sixpence about his plan to destroy the Sexy Brutale, which would have probably resulted in the clockmaker double-checking Lucas's timers, which would've meant the bombs going off on time instead of killing all of Lucas's friends in a premature fire.
• Incredibly Lame Pun:
  Three Hearts: Who uses a dumbwaiter these days? *Beat* A DUMB RESTAURANT OWNER! Ha ha ha! *Beat* God, I'm tired.
  • Sixpence's robot dealer in the casino spouts off a bunch of incredibly lame playing card puns.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: After having his question about the gunshot turned away, Clay questions whether he's had too much to drink… then Sixpence's robot dealer makes another Incredibly Lame Pun and he decides no, he hasn't had nearly enough.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: Greyson is on the hunt for the Moloch Egg in the theatre, and he knows Lucas has one of his safes around somewhere. He finds it, opens it up, and the BGM rises to a crescendo… and then stops.
  Greyson: GOD DAMN IT. THAT IS NOT AN EGG.
• Magic Mirror: If you follow the staff after they've completed a murder, you'll end up in a dead-end where there's a strange mirror. The staff walk into the mirrors to get around the mansion. The last mask grants you the ability to walk through these mirrors, too.
• Malevolent Masked Men: Calling the staff Gas Mask Mooks would be doing them a bit of a disservice. So long as you don't intervene, they pull off their elaborate murder plot effortlessly.
• Masquerade Ball: The theme of the party, so everyone's wearing fancy clothes and ornate masks.
• Meaningful Background Event:
  • The speakers announce that "The Marquis invites you to tonight's show! 7 P.M. in the theater!" So the significance of the bell ringing at 6:50 is misinterpreted as being related to that, except it's actually Willow hanging herself in the bell tower.
  • Everywhere in the casino, you can hear Tequila singing, though during your first playthrough you'd think it was just part of the music. The end of her singing is important in the casino especially since her singing and her body falling into the garden are directly related to Trinity's death. Trinity stays in the garden partially because of the singing, and she walks into the web because she finds Tequila's body and freaks out.
  • At about 10:10, wherever you are in the mansion, the lights will flicker for a moment before going back to normal. This signifies Redd getting electrocuted in the theater.
  • The sound of glass shattering can be heard throughout the mansion around 4:15, but you don't understand that it's Lucas jumping out of the clock tower until much later in the game.
• Metroidvania: The game has elements of this, with large areas of the mansion that are inaccessible until you acquire one of the guests' abilities. Justified as this is a puzzle game, and in order to have any sort of difficulty curve you need to have linearity in some fashion.
• Mind Screw: When you enter the cottage in the garden. It only gets weirder from there.
• Mood Whiplash: In most areas, the music becomes tense when a victim in that area is about to die. As the victim enters their death throes, the background music crescendos, then falls silent… and immediately the soundtrack resumes its original jaunty tune.
• Motif: There are three primary motifs: gambling, fire, and time.
  • The game takes place in a casino, and Lafcadio used to have a gambling addiction. Moreover, the pocketwatch is patterned after a roulette table, and the interface is patterned after poker chips. Also, the staff are all named after playing cards. On a more abstract level, many of the guests die because they took too many risks — such as Trinity sneaking into the garden or Greyson rushing into an obvious trap. And insurance, which played a major role in Lucas's get-rich-quick scheme that went horribly wrong, is inherently all about risks and unforeseeable troubles.
  • Lafcadio's mask sets aflame whenever a guest or staff member is nearby, and blue flames engulf certain doors to bar passage through them. Moreover, there are ornate fireplaces throughout the Sexy Brutale, and some of the staff light them at certain times. Two of the guests die after being engulfed in flames. This is because Lucas's insurance fraud plan went horribly wrong and killed all of his friends in the fire that he set.
  • Time is incredibly important in this game because of the "Groundhog Day" Loop premise, but remarkably, there are grandfather clocks in every region of the mansion. The main item of the game is the pocketwatch. Moreover, all of the guests are either impatient or patient rather than something in between. Sixpence, Willow, Tequila, Greyson, and Thanos are all too impatient, whereas Clay, Trinity, and Aurum are all too patient, and Redd loses his ability to keep his cool as his death draws near. This relates to Lucas's impatience with his financial troubles. His insurance fraud scheme came about because he wanted a lot of money quickly, and his scheme failed because he didn't set the timer right.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Said by Lucas almost word for word when he realizes he's set the timer wrong and his mansion is burning down, killing everyone inside.
• My Nayme Is: It's the Sexy Brutale, not the Sexy Brutal. According to the Reaper of Cards in the Basement, this is because Lucas thought it sounded more "glamorous".
• Not Me This Time: Subverted with Willow Blue's death. She is the only one whose death isn't directly caused by a staff member. However her death was still set up by the same mastermind as the others.
• Properly Paranoid: Thanos is the only guest who seems to be aware of the shadiness of the staff. Aurum is similarly concerned that the elevator he's about to step into used to be part of the furnace system, even if Thanos says it's been disconnected.
• Rain of Blood: When the player runs out of time, illusional red rain gradually appears on the screen until the rewind is forced.
• Red Herring: The Bloody Girl, the mysterious staff who can walk through mirrors, the giant voodoo fish, and the bloody rain at midnight all suggest something very occult is going on. It's actually all in Lucas' mind as he punishes himself for the accidental murder of his friends and family.
• Repetitive Name: Greyson Grayson.
• Reverse Whodunnit: The central concept of the game. It's not a question of who committed the murders or how the victim was killed — you find out the staff are the ones murdering everyone at the very beginning of the game, and you'll most likely witness the murders firsthand several times. The real puzzle becomes figuring out a way to indirectly prevent the murder from happening in the first place, and, more broadly, what the killers' motives are.
• Right on the Tick: Every instance of character movement in the mansion, every sound, character line, and (unless averted) death, will happen at an exact time between midday and midnight. Much of the game's soundtrack incorporates the ticking of the mansion's many clocks (and/or Lafcadio's pocketwatch) into the beat to emphasize this precision, and in most places, the soundtrack incorporates suspenseful chords in the seconds when a death is imminent.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Another key gameplay concept. When you reset time, all the items you've picked up go back to where you found them, except for certain key items like the pocketwatch. Knowledge, however, like the passcode to a security system, the recipe for a magic charm, and the location of secret passages, you take with you and can use on subsequent time loops.
• Servile Snarker: Pretty much all members of the staff are sarcastic in one way or another about the various deaths about the house and the dangers kept around.
  Two Diamonds: It's at times like these I wish I was less competent...
• Source Music: Much of the game's soundtrack exists in-universe.
  • The music heard in the bar, for example, is being played by a band in one of the back rooms.
  • Tequila's song can be heard in the background of the casino track.
  • A number of record players provide music in other areas.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Like Majora's Mask, the game is about a guy utilizing a "Groundhog Day" Loop to save people with the aid of magical masks.
• Suddenly Shouting: Nine Spades, when Nine Hearts irritates him too much.
  Nine Hearts: The off switch...
  Nine Spades: LINKED! PAIRED! IT'S BLOODY IMPOSSIBLE FOR THAT ONE BLOKE TO TURN IT OFF ON HIS OWN, ALRIGHT? ...Just give it a rest! We've done our job, and I'm going to the bar.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Clay asks his waiter about a strange noise. The waiter tries to claim they didn't hear it, despite knowing the sound was a man being murdered and identifying the sound much more precisely than Clay did. Unfortunately, by this point, Clay's drunk, so he just accepts the explanation and gets back to what he was doing.
  Clay: Hey, what was that noise?
  Staff Member: Ha! WHAT gunshot, sir? I certainly didn't hear it!
• Take a Third Option: If you're trying to get 100% Completion, you may accidentally stumble into this option, but after a second playthrough, it becomes a legitimate option for the player to choose. Rather than choosing to continue tormenting himself or accepting his loss and moving on with his life, Lafcadio can enter the Room of Old Habits and give in to his old gambling addiction. This ends with a Dance Party Ending.
• This Is Gonna Suck: This is Clay's reaction to the Incredibly Lame Puns that Sixpence programmed into the skeletal blackjack dealer. It's also implied to be Tequila's reaction to Seven Clubs' piano playing.
  Tequila: Well, I used to sing along to my drunk uncle banging paint cans together, so I'm sure I can make this work.
• Toilet Humor: Provided by the above Nine Hearts and Nine Spades, as they return through a room full of musty books.
  Nine Spades: The smell...
  Nine Hearts: Innocent!
• Tomato in the Mirror: Everyone in the mansion is a hallucination of Lucas's. Lafcadio Boone, the player character, is also a hallucination, but he's a personification of Lucas's most noble aspects as Lucas tries to forgive himself for what he did 40 years ago. As such, it makes sense that the player character is a priest.
• Unreliable Narrator: The events of the story are told from the perspective of Lucas's intensely depressed and tormented mind, and the Golden Skull admits to embellishing certain things to make Lucas feel worse about his friends' deaths. While some elements of the game can be taken literally, like how characters looked, we can't know the layout of the mansion or the real personalities of the guests. After saving a guest, we cannot know how they would've behaved, since this is all a hallucination of Lucas's. This is the most clear after saving Tequila, who explains that she would've wanted Lucas and Eleanor to be happy.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Parodied with The Waiting Room, which gets its own Brochure entry despite being so utterly featureless and boring that the lore (understandably) posits you probably don't even remember seeing it.
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Played with. Every time you save one of the guests' lives, you put on their mask and gain a new ability. So while solving their puzzle isn't exactly "defeating" them, it fills the same function.
• Weirdness Censor: Aurum walks through a room of musical instruments being played by ghosts (though to him it just looks like the instruments are playing themselves) and after a few seconds of staring assumes that they're more of Sixpence's contraptions.
  • Similarly, neither Tequila nor Redd react when ghosts open doors in front of them.
  • Despite the noise being heard throughout the whole house, nobody reacts to the shattering glass at 4:15. Justified in the fact that the guests likely can't hear it due to the nature of the sound.
• Whole-Plot Reference: In the children's story Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back by Shel Silverstein, a hunter shoots at the titular character, only to find that his rifle is not loaded, and then Lafcadio eats the hunter. This is very similar to the tutorial section of The Sexy Brutale, where a hunting rifle is used to kill Sixpence, who kills the staff member if Lafcadio Boone puts a blank in the rifle. Moreover, Lafcadio-the-lion forgets that he's a lion until he returns to Africa and another lion reminds him of his true identity. The lions and the hunters try to convince him to join their respective sides, but Lafcadio-the-lion rejects both of them and walks off into the distance, never to be heard from again. The story of Lafcadio Boone, forgetting his identity as Lucas and being forced to choose the side of either the hunters or the hunted, follows this basic plot.
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: The day automatically resets when the clock reaches midnight.

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