Soundtrack: The Sexy Brutale — a masquerade that tells time by ear

Introduction — the sound of a ball that rewinds at midnight

Guests at a masquerade are being murdered, one by one, by the mansion's own staff. In this time-loop mystery that Komugi reviewed, the music Matt Bonham and Tim Cotterell wrote opens on a smell of liquor and cigarettes. When the preacher Lafcadio Boone wakes in the chapel and steps into the casino-mansion called The Sexy Brutale, what reaches your ear is electro-swing that conjures a 1920s ball. Roughly mid-tempo — the kind of pace that has your body swaying before you have finished pouring a cup of black coffee — with the saxophone credited to Leeroy Horns rising like smoke.

It was on my second midnight that I realized this breezy sound is actually the most precise clock in the house. Each time the watch reaches a set hour, the day rewinds and the same tragedy repeats to the second. And the music rewinds with it. The game was made by the UK's Cavalier Game Studios and Spain's Tequila Works, who cite loop-of-time works like Groundhog Day and Majora's Mask as inspirations. Time that runs in a circle is well suited to music that runs in one too.

The music becomes a clock — measuring your thinking time by ear

Every wing of The Sexy Brutale is assigned its own soundtrack. And each piece shifts its expression as the day advances, quietly warning your ear that something is about to happen. As Kotaku's Nathan Grayson put it, the casino's music swings along lightly in the early afternoon, but grows louder and more urgent the closer the clock ticks to the killing.

So this music is not wallpaper for mood. It is an instrument that plays 'when.' The core of a time-loop mystery is observing events that occur at fixed hours and reading their choreography. Before long the player can gauge 'how many minutes left' from the rising tension alone, without ever glancing at the on-screen clock. Just as I have a habit of counting everything in BPM, this game makes the player count time by the density of its sound — a third way of keeping time that is neither silence nor an over-looped bed.

A voice for each room, and cues that ring every day

That the music differs by wing means the sound is also a map. The hush of the library, the clamor of the casino, the low tones that sink toward the basement — even with your eyes closed you know where in the mansion you stand. It is a design that teaches you the space by ear.

More interesting still are the 'cues' that ring at exactly the same hour every day. At one moment a gunshot rings out and almost every character reacts. A bell tolls from somewhere. Each rewind, the lights flicker at the same instant. These are sounds that actually sound within the story (diegetic sound), yet for the player they double as a metronome ticking out 'what hour it is now.' Music, sound effect, and narrative mesh into a single clockwork — no wonder the game was nominated for Music Design at the 2017 Develop Awards.

The puzzle analogy — replaying the same track, over and over

As someone who collects records, I would say that solving a time loop feels a lot like dropping the needle on one disc again and again. On the first pass you hear only the melody. On the second you notice the inner voices moving. On the third you finally hear where the bass lets go of its support. A day in The Sexy Brutale is the same — each rewind, details you missed before rise into hearing.

And the very structure of the music teaches you the tempo of the solution. Just as a piece crescendos toward its cadence, a day in the mansion builds toward a fixed catastrophe. What we do is swap out a single note of the chord before that cadence (the murder) can fully sound. To solve the puzzle is to touch the score in exactly one place and dodge a cadence that was supposed to be inevitable. The instant it works, the music slips into the next silence without ever landing on its resolving chord — a pleasure very much like a deceptive cadence in composition.

Tracks worth hearing

The official soundtrack is sold, credited to Matt Bonham and Tim Cotterell, as a soundtrack DLC on Steam ↗ (published by Tequila Works / BadLand Games). If I name one track, make it 'The Sexy Brutale Theme.' It is the face of the mansion and the signal that a day has begun.

To hear lightness and unease living together, try 'Tequila at Noon'; to feel the texture of catastrophe, 'Shattered Hope (Tequila's Theme).' You should be able to hear the foreboding of loss set into the floor of the electro-swing.

Note: this time I could not find a free source (YouTube, etc.) that I could confirm as an official channel, so I am refraining from embedding and simply pointing to the officially sold Steam OST DLC — following this site's policy of not linking full-length uploads whose provenance cannot be verified.

In closing — what I would steal

If I were writing music, this is what I would steal: the idea of letting sound measure the hour. Most game music switches on place or mood, but The Sexy Brutale translated time itself into the density of sound. It designs the gradient of tension as a timer, and plants short cues that ring at fixed hours (gunshot, bell, flicker) as 'stakes that never move.' The listener unconsciously measures their position against those stakes.

Two things to take back to the workbench. First, write the curve of the build as a function of elapsed time. Second, plant a few stingers whose placement never drifts, giving the listener an anchor for their sense of time. Next time you are stuck on a puzzle, try listening instead of looking at the screen. This mansion is always telling you, in sound, that you are almost there. If the tension design of these mansion-bound games intrigues you, pair this with the full review.

Reference links

・Steam: The Sexy Brutale OST — official soundtrack DLC (published by Tequila Works / BadLand Games)

・Steam: The Sexy Brutale store page

・Wikipedia: The Sexy Brutale (composers Matt Bonham & Tim Cotterell; 2017 Develop Awards 'Music Design' nominee)

・Kotaku (Nathan Grayson): on the per-wing adaptive music and the cues that ring at the same hour each day

・Discogs: The Sexy Brutale Soundtrack (credit verification — Bonham / Cotterell / Puttick / French)