YMMV / The Sexy Brutale

• Awesome Music: "The Sexy Brutale Theme", a variation of which often plays whenever you manage to save a guest.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Actually used to good effect. The game not-so-subtly points to The Gold Skull and Lucas Bondes being one and the same, but it successfully manages to distract from the more shocking twist of Lafcadio also being Lucas.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The name "Lafcadio" comes from the Greek place-name Lefkada, which in turn comes from the Greek word for "white." Lafcadio's mask, before the Bloody Girl's blessing, is pure white, and he's a preacher so he probably would know these things.
  • The name "Thanos" comes from the name of the Greek god of Death Thanatos, and foreshadows that the mansion and everyone in it are already dead since Thanos is the mansion's creator. It's also a reference to a famous thought experiment by Freud which claims that our entire lives are motivated by Sex and Death, with the entire plot being a result of Lucas' obsessive guilt over causing the death of everyone he loved.
  • Real tequila is made from blue agave plants. Tequila Belle and Willow Blue are great friends.
  • Inspecting the various books found throughout the mansion, especially in the Library, give great bonuses and show that this is set in an Alternate Universe. For instance, Franz Kafka dedicated The Metamorphosis to Sixpence; in reality, it was published posthumously. A couple of rooms over, you can find a copy of The History of Cardenio, a lost Shakespeare play that details the life of a character during the events of Don Quixote.
• Player Punch: You can only save one guest per day, and the clock immediately resets afterwards, undoing whatever good you just did. So, you're going to become very familiar with the audio and visual cues for everyone's deaths as they happen over and over and over and over again. Sometimes, it weighs on you, when you're near the time and place of someone's death and hear the music building, knowing exactly what's going to happen and how to stop it, but you have no choice but to let them die in order to save someone else. Particularly haunting cues are the gunshot that kills Sixpence, the bell ringing as Willow hangs herself from its rope, and the electricity flickering as Redd electrocutes himself in a desperate attempt to save Greyson. No matter where you are, you will see/hear those three triggers, and it's a constant reminder of your failure to save them.
  • Worse still, you can't actually save anyone. They all died forty years ago. The guests you save are merely memories of Lucas' friends that he's desperately clinging to.
• That One Sidequest: Collecting all 52 playing cards. Many are hidden in otherwise incidental background elements, like bookcases, requiring you to search every last interactive object in the mansion. A few more require talking to just the right ghosts. And then there are ones that require you to get to certain fireplaces before the staff lights. And if that wasn't enough, while you're told how many cards you've collected, you can't see which cards you have.

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