The issue with waiting for a game for years and finally playing is that it somehow always turns out a disappointment. I am not saying that is the reason this game wasn't good, it has enough flaws as it it, but for some reason all the big games we wait for for years all turn out kinda garbage. No Man's Sky, Star Citizen (I guess that is somewhat different), Duke Nukem Forever. I am sure there are lots of exceptions but I can't think of any. Twelve Minutes has been one of those games for me. I was instantly hooked when I saw the trailer for it years ago, and has been following it ever since. I was really excited when I saw that Willem Dafoe would have one of the voice roles, and the voice acting really is stellar, but that is most of what it has going for it.

For the first 2 hours or so I was quite enjoying myself. Walking around in my time loop, trying out the different options and seeing what happened. It felt like it was well put together - most of what I did got a response that seemed natural - but as I was trying to solve the mystery it got more and more frustrating. I quite like short games, so the amount of content doesn't bother me. If it had been a good 3 hour experience I would have been perfectly happy with that. However, what annoys me the most is how you solve the mystery which I will put in spoiler tags.

As you play through the loops you gradually get more information about what is happening and you of course use this information to progress in the next loop. Naturally when I got a piece of information in one outcome I'd try to use this in a different execution of the scenario. This is generally how I progressed at the first half of the game, but at some point it felt like I just needed to repeat the same "good loop" over and over again with gradually more information. You start the loop, redo the 5 things to set up the scenario where people actually talk together, wait for it to happen, sit through a slightly different conversation, and then repeat this 4 or 5 times. It was unsatisfying and frankly quite disappointing. Maybe there are different ways of solving the ending, but I did not find it. I don't know how many times I tortured that poor cop trying to get a different resolution with more information.

All in all I liked the beginning, and the like the idea, it just fell flat at the end so I'll give it a generous three stars. The resolution to the mystery is... eh... it's okay, but by the time I got there I wasn't expecting anything more. Maybe I need to learn this lesson, that these long expected games never turn out as well as you hope. Who am I kidding? When is Silksong coming out?

I'm going to start out with, I don't like to be negative about games. I like that games are typically made for someone, and even if it's not for me, someone out there probably enjoyed the game.

I think I can safely say that this game is the exception. There is little redeeming quality about this game. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't click the blocks moving forward, and I'm still very worked up about this game, so some of the spoilers might be curses....forewarned.

First of all, the voice talent. Nice gets! But why the hell did you not use them. The only way I knew there was star powered voice talent was because they told me. The actors were so genericized, that they could have been any random person and it wouldn't have mattered.

Second, the playable space was so limited, and the interactable objects were so few, that this game was beyond boring. Couple that with the slowness of the movement and lack of ability to speed things up (I know you can fast-forward some dialouge, but that's only a start) and I really felt robbed of time.

Third, the plot twists (seriously, don't read this if you don't want to be spoiled) I somehow fucking forgot that i killed my dad and i'm now secretly married to and expecting a child with my half sister? What the actual fuck?! And if that's not enough, there's a pocket watch that's worth a lot of money that lets me kinda rewind time, enough so that I can go back 8 years in the past before my father died and have a conversation about something eight years in the future?

Next, as i'm sure is not a surprise is the number of endings. I looked it up after the fact, and there's more than I got, BUT....one of the endings I got made me forget everything and I had to restart the game? No way in HELL am I doing that drudgery a second time.

Bottom line is, I did not enjoy my time with this game, except complaining about it on my discord with other gamers that got a chuckle at my anger.

I don't recommend playing it to ANYONE. It's not a game for you, trust me.

~David.

I was pretty excited for 12 minutes. I enjoy story based, point and click types of games. I love the look and cast. But after that it kind of just becomes a let down as a whole.

The idea is cool, I love groundhogs day kind of stuff. However playing this kind of made me realize all games are that way, this just did it in a more story focused way.

The story is about a man who comes home and his wife has something special to tell him. After their nice dinner a man comes to their door and in the end people die. But why? I like the set up. The voice cast is also solid.

But the gameplay just lacks, I played it on Xbox one and a controller and even tho I knew it was point and click kind of game it still felt very out dated and sluggish. I was not a fan of the controls at all. They didn’t grow on me as it went either it just kept making me think it could have been done better.

The controls on top of the fact that you have to keep doing a lot of the same story bits over and over until you find a bread crumble just didn’t mess well. I really wanted to like the puzzle aspect but it just felt like a drag.

It really didn’t feel to challenging but I do wonder what all I missed? I know I only unlocked two achievements so I definitely didn’t do much. But I also didn’t feel the need or want to keep playing.

The twist ending is a wtf moment that you start to put together but wonder if they’ll really pull the trigger on it…. But that isn’t enough for me to recommend it.

Thankful for Gamepass.

I've been excited for this game for years. It was, by far, my most anticipated game of this year. Sure I clearly had my expectations but I don't think I was being unreasonable hyped and I think there are some clear problems with the game.

• There's one solution to almost every "puzzle". This means that completely logical paths end up in ridiculous defeat because you're just not supposed to solve it that way. Sometimes this solutions involve saying something X only after doing something else, so you may believe saying X doesn't do anything, but you just didn't say Y before. It particularly annoyed me that when I figured out how to make the wife believe I was in a time loop she still refused to tell me where the watch was, acting completely unreasonable even though she believed me and she seemed totally on board

• There's a particular state of the game that you can only reach by doing about 3 minutes of particular actions. Once you're in that state though, there are many possibilities and, as I said before, the solution may be quite obfuscated, so you'll have to keep doing that 3 minute preparation over and over and over again just to say something slightly different and see if something happens. Luckily most other scenes have shortcuts to get you to the result faster.

• It's super short. I beat in 5 hours and saw almost everything worthwhile the game had to offer.

• The ending is terrible. I don't think there's anything else I can add because it just makes me mad. I mean seriously "it was all a dream all along!!" has to be on the top for absolutely worst twist you can make

Now, it still has some redeeming qualities. Some puzzles are actually quite clever and I like that it doesn't hold your hand, but it provides ample clues to solve some of the puzzles. The voice acting, as expected, was great. It's actually really fun to experiment with all the things you can do, so many "hmmm... what if...?" that you can actually fulfill. Well, at least is fun when you can do it in the beginning in the loop and not when you're 7 minutes in a careful series of events, at that point in the run I didn't like to experiment at all because it would mean I had to do it all over again. The plot on the first half was pretty good.

Overall, it was okay. I feel like there's a great game hidden somewhere amidst the frustration and the awful ending.

I was wholly prepared to hate this game. I've read the reviews, heard the 4 friends discuss their disgust, and seen disturbing images of the choices you can make.

With all of that, I actually kind of enjoyed my time in the world.

The opening menu is gorgeous, the score is incredible, the top-down perspective is surprisingly fun for a game that takes itself so seriously, and Willem Dafoe delivers a Willem Dafoe performance.

Having just finished The 7th Guest, I was reminded how far adventure games have come. In 12 Minutes, the touch targets are clear, the tooltips are straight-forward, the dialog gives you hints without just opening a new tab to gamefaqs.com, and you're able to skip some of the interactions.

But, dear lord, the story. Having finished and sat with the full scope of the story in my mind, I'm not really sure why it needed to be told. The opening is intriguing but it lulls in the middle thanks to repetitive game play mechanics other time loop games have demonstrated how to avoid. And then the ending(s). Props to the cast and crew for committing to the whole thing but I started "nope nope nope"-ing out a good hour before the game was done with me.

I'd been excited to play this so I could know why there was such a negative reaction to it, which lowered my expectations enough to see the handful of nice design details. I'm glad to have this one marked off.