From the very first teasers ans trailers I awaited "12 Minutes". It was a pretty cool concept of us coming back home, to our little apartment after work. Our loving wife greets us, but this pleasant time lasts only… 12 minutes.

Those of you who had a chance of watching Bill Murray in "The Groundhog Day" might know what it is like. We are stuck in a time loop. While in the loop you have to do something to stop the it from repeating itself endlessly. Bill Murray’s loop lasted a day, ours only 12 minutes.

"Twelve Minutes" is a thriller with some point and click elements. We have a limited time, and while playing you will find yourself repeating many actions every time pushing the game further. As you interact with items and try to connect pieces of information together, you also unlock more dialogue options. Because of that, you’ll have to replay similar sections of the game over and over again, uncertain what to do.

The lack of consistency can be frustrating sometimes. For instance, we have something in our inventory, but the we cannot use it as the game does not allow for that. Even though it can save our life.

Overall, the game feels very cinematic. Well written dialogues recorded by professionals make it easier for us to immerse in this experience. Nevertheless, some elements don’t go hand in hand with the way real conversations happen. One of the examples is when we make our wife furious with a question, but if we ask about something else, she is back to being sweet and polite. WTF!!?

Last but not least, we don’t really know how to achieve our goal and what the goal actually is. We wander cluelessly, rummaging the three rooms looking for clues hoping to find something new.

Watching Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day" was fun as we could experience all the funny ways the story could unfold. In "12 Minutes", we experience the frustrations first-handedly, ploughing through this chore a number of times.

I was pretty hyped about playing this game. I thought this would have been a short but very polished and stylish indie game that would have left me pleased, but I was terribly wrong.

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I have very few good things to say about it.

First of all, the concept, which is cool (even though not so original as some can imagine). Having to repeat a little section but finding new things to progress opens the door to a lot of creativity, which sadly is not what the game managed to do.

Visually, if u take a screenshot of it, it looks good. I say it this way because when u actually play the game, the animations are so clunky it's embarrassing, especially if u think that you can't even do that much.

The audio is nice, the game has some eureka moments that are cool and the story gets somewhat interesting at some point, but wow it turned out to be so nonsense I was embarrassed while watching it.

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So, I guess I can start with the bad.

The game was clearly made for the mouse, it's a point and click, and playing it on the couch with a controller was a total pain.
You miss click so many times, sometimes requiring you to restart the loop just for a little mistake. I really can't understand why they didn't put more effort to make it more enjoyable with a controller, at least for the movement.

It was also so weird that every time you open the menu, you have this freeze, with no audio, and a slightly different palette. Since u have to open the menu so often, it was atmosphere-breaking.

As said before, the animations are super clunky. I can understand that maybe they had a low budget, but like it's not that they had to animate a full combat move set, and the characters are also pretty far from the camera so it doesn't even have to be perfect. It's just bad to look at while they do things.

Also, they had great actors for the voices, but I really didn't like the dubbing. That's because of the way they change the tone, and how quickly (and without logic) they switch from angry to sad and so on, it's so terrible and off-putting, and even when it should be simple, it sounds so forced and fake.

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Talking about the core gameplay, I thought that they made it so there would have been a lot of creativity and different ways to solve the same thing, but you are actually expected to do very specific actions for every step.
It's annoying because when in a loop you get a lot of information but then you are not really able to use them in the next loop it feels like they just want you to do the ONE thing they thought. You should be able to have so many more interactions with your wife for example, while, after some loops and until a big reveal, they actually don't change much.

You have an object to find, and you would think there are a lot of different ways to find it, but you really have to do one specific thing.
The game doesn't even hide this, because sometimes you think about solutions that should work in theory, but then you can see the developers understood that you would have tried that and made it so it doesn't work.

An example, that could be a little spoiler, is that when your wife asks for help after the policeman gets in the house, the policeman instead of going first in the bedroom (and so getting the shock) comes first to the closet, while in other situations it goes first in the bedroom. And this is true for so many things.

The weird thing is that the game is not even that short, so it would be good if they added multiple ways of finding the solution so that it would have been more rewarding and replayable, but they didn't.

Another thing is that the second part is so bad I have no words, basically you have to repeat the loop again and again just changing one decision so that in the next loop you can get another single one and so on for 2 hours. So boring, I have no words.
Especially because, and this is also true for the first part, there are so many extra options that just don't lead anywhere if not just 1-2 more lines to give you the impressions that you did something different, but they literally are just there just to make you lose time and have to do another loop from the start. They almost give you no context, if not just an extra reaction from your wife, or another answer on the phone.

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At least you would hope the story would be good, but wow, what a mess, it feels like a teen had written this, especially for the "plot twist", that it is so cringe, forced, and unnecessary that you can see they tried to gain popularity by exploiting the "we have a huge plot twist" thing. It doesn't make sense at all. The story would have been a bit better without it, even though it sounds forced anyway. I only got interested in the story at the beginning, before the details started to be revealed, because it really is nonsense.

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I'm really sad about this, is one of those times I almost feel robbed of my time (ironically I can't go back as him). It seemed such a thrilling game, but I can see their main skill is marketing.

I don't recommend you to play it, it's not good, and it drags so much you would prefer to throw your controller to the tv than keep playing it.
Also, this is not the only game that uses the loop concept out there for you to play if you are not afraid of indie-indie games (heck they made an entire jam around this concept https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/results ), it's not worth it to play this only for that.

Do yourself a favor and do not waste 10 minutes, multiple times.

En ole hetkeen pelannut point n click-pelejä, mutta tämän ylhäältäpäin tyylikkäästi kuvatun pelin idea ja muutamat hehkutukset saivat minut kokeilemaan peliä, kun se kerran ilmestyi Game Passiin julkaisupäivänä.

12 minutes alkaa ihan normaalista päivästä, jossa pelaaja on juuri saapumassa töistä kotiin pieneen jenkkiläiseen kerrostalokaksioon. Vaimo ottaa sinut lämpimästi vastaan ja kertoo, että hän on tehnyt illallisen. Romanttisen kynttiläillallisen keskeyttää kuitenkin koputus ja sisään pyrkivä poliisi, joka väittää pelaajan vaimon syyllistyneen oman isänsä murhaan. Tiettyjen vaiheiden jälkeen poliisi kuristaa pelaajan kuoliaaksi ja kuollessaan pelaaja palaa siihen hetkeen kun hän astui kotiinsa ja sama aikalooppi lähtee pyörimään uudelleen ja uudelleen.

Pelissä on nokkelia puzzleja, ja hyvää hoksaamista vaativaa kliksuttelua. Alkuun tuntuu, että pienessä kaksiossa ei ole edes tarpeeksi esineitä ja kokeiltavaa. Pikku hiljaa kuitenkin peli etenee kokeilun ja erehdyksen kautta. Muutamaan kertaan jäin hieman jumiin, mutta muutoin peli eteni kohtuullisen jouhevasti. Tarina aukeaa looppi kerrallaan ja kaikkea ei ole mahdollistakaan avata heti pelin alussa vaan pelihahmolle kertyvä tieto on merkittävä tekijä pelin avaamisessa.

Tarinallisesti peli vaikuttaa aluksi mielenkiintoiselta, mutta loppupuolella tulevat paljastukset tuntuvat kokonaisuudessa hieman oudoilta. Jäin jokatapauksessa peliin koukkuun, niin etten millään malttanut lopettaa peliä iltaisin. Kolme iltaa pelissä taisi mennä ja aina pelikerran jälkeen jäin miettimään, mitä seuraavaksi voisi vielä kokeilla. Peli on ryyditetty kovan luokan ääninäyttelijöillä (Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, James Macavoy), jotka täyttävät tonttinsa erittäin hyvin. Kaiken kaikkiaan hyvin tehty aikalooppauspeli, joka kokeilee ihan kivasti uudenlaistakin tarinankerrontaa.

Hyvä 3/5

"Oh 12 minutes how I was expecting you to be a game to remember. Unfortunately I will only remember how disappointed I was when I reached the ending (for the first time). But maybe it's on me and not on you."

Because I feel like I let my expectations run wild. I might've taken a seat in the hype train and trust me, it wouldn't be the first time.

The game is not all bad, not at all. The first few hours in the game are really promising. The game gives you so much room for experimenting. "What if this time I do this instead of that? And this time I won't do that!" The game moves forward steadily and most of the problems can be overcome with a few loops of trial and error. However, that's about it. Soon after you get things rolling you are met with the end of the game and left wondering what actually had happened.

The voice-acting in 12 Minutes is stable, art style nice and gameplay plausible, but nothing is really exceptional. After completing the game I felt fooled. "All the hype and praise and that's it?"

The experience was a pleasant enough however and this game got it's place on the 9th place of my top 10 games of 2021.

I remember this game being one of the first to kick off that brief period of time loop games. While Outer Wilds & Forgotten City were open world exploration affairs, and Deathloop was an FPS, Twelve Minutes went for a point and click adventure style. It also boasted a star-studded cast.

So, let’s get into the gameplay. As mentioned, it’s a point and click adventure game played from a top-down perspective. You explore the one-bedroom apartment you share with your wife, which is about the same size as my apartment, to find items. Each room has a few items to interact with: a phone, mug, knife, pills, etc. The intractability with these objects is severely limited. It’s on the level of an old online Flash adventure game. There’s no radial menu on how you want to use or view an item, it’s all just straightforward. You have a knife, all it does is stab people, or open grates, nothing inventive to be had. There’s times where I thought I was being clever, like leaving a phone lit up in a dark bedroom, expecting it to lure a person in there, but that doesn’t fit the game’s plan, so it fails. I get planning for everything a player might try is a tall order, but it definitely felt like a “You will keep playing this till you get it right” vibe. The time loop mechanic is novel enough. It’s fun in the beginning as you go on this adventure with your player character trying to figure out what’s going on, then after you exhaust all the ideas you’ve come up with the game kinda flounders. You aren’t given any hints through off-hand dialogue or indicators of what you MUST do to advance the plot. I felt like I was spinning my wheels for most of the middle section. Once you do figure out what to do, the pacing picks up again as you can see all the dots starting to connect. As a game centered on a time loop, repetition is the name of the game. Twelve Minutes is a little too repetitious, Forgotten City figured this out by giving you Galerius to handle the repetitive puzzles you already solved. Twelve Minutes has that a little bit in that conversations that took you 5 minutes originally are shortened down to 1, but the number of times I roofied my wife would’ve gotten me put on a watchlist.

Outside the time loop mechanic, the other major aspect of this game is the story. You play a husband voiced by James McAvoy who’s married to Daisy Ridley. You are enjoying an evening at home where you learn you’re having a baby when Willem Dafoe the “Cop” busts through the door, ties you up, interrogates, and kills you. You then warp back to when you first walked int the door, no one but you wiser to what happened. Obviously, you then set out to find out why you’re looping back and how do you break it. They definitely seem to be going for a Hitchcock, supernatural thriller vibe, and they somewhat execute that well. From this point on the safety is off on spoilers. As you go through the evening over and over again, you learn your wife killed her father and is in possession of his expensive antique pocket watch. Dafoe seems to be a real cop, but he’s desperate. He wants to steal the watch to pay for his daughter’s cancer treatments. After dying several times, learning about your wife’s childhood, Dafoe’s friendship with her father, and an affair the father had with a nanny, you finally have all the pieces to get what seems like the ending that will break the loop. Your wife didn’t really kill her father, Dafoe is willing to listen to reason, your wife gives him the watch to pay for his daughter’s treatment and you all let bygones be bygones… but then they mention the nanny had a kid. Time resets and you are back to wondering what it takes to break the cycle.

As a time loop mystery thriller game, the plot is sprinkled with little twists here and there. First your wife killer her father, then she didn’t, etc, etc. I was wondering if Dafoe was the nanny’s kid, but I’m also not sure what the character’s age is supposed to be as Willem Dafoe sounds like the older gentleman he is. But no, the game pulls a bold twist. Turns out, you are the nanny’s son and your wife is your half-sister. I guess it’s a “good” twist just for the shear out of left field, what the fuckery. Least now we know the exact type of adult videos this story director watches. Up until this point the husband has been more an outside observer to all his wife's family issues, but now he is in the thick of it. It also turns out it was you who killed the father you share with your wife. Willem Dafoe has the best line delivery when he disgustedly announces, “You killed your father… and married your sister?!”. Dafoe by far gives the best performance, but as a child of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man era, I'm a little biased.

Then the game loses the plot. We see flashbacks where your shared father confronts you over your incestual relationship. He starts mentioning about how he can’t believe we’re having a baby with our half-sister. Now, he’s been dead for eight years and we just learned about the baby, casting doubt on whether all that’s happened was real. The father is also voiced by Willem Dafoe. I don’t know if that’s intentional or just a cost-cutting measure. The game flirts with the idea that this whole thing is a dream thought up by the husband/brother or different scenarios he plays out. I’ve seen some theories where he isn’t actually married to his sister, he just dreams about it. That’s still weird, but I guess makes it a little more palatable… It’s a very uncomfortable twist. You also never really break the time loop, lending more credence this game isn’t set in a physical world. Honestly the ending is a real whimper. It leaves you confused, but not in a fun way, because you really want to find an ending where you break the loop and learn you aren’t actually fucking your half-sister. No, all the endings just sorta double back on themselves. There’s no definitive end point to the game, unless you count the ending where your father hypnotizes you, which clears your save data and starts the game over again. It reminds me of the Council in that it seems to lose faith in its own story by the end and just sputters around before it ends.

All in all, this game started out with promise, but the ending never stuck the landing. I didn’t get the closure I was looking for. And there’s that nuclear bomb of a twist, I guess it’s tricky to do a time loop game and not just make it derivative of Groundhog Day where the answer is do everything right, and be a good person. The repetition in the mid-section also didn’t help this game.

It may not have been the worst, but this was easily the most infuriating, frustrating and conflicting game I’ve played this year so far. On the surface, Twelve Minutes had everything to become an indie point-and-click classic: an intriguing loop, a mysterious narrative, an impressive array of branching possibilities, incredibly reputable voice acting, an aesthetically pleasing, almost Hitchcock whodunnit vibe, and several possible outcomes. In the end, however, it throws almost every one of these aspects away, leaving you with a bitter taste in your mouth and, above all, a lot more questions than answers. And not in a good way, like competent mysteries do: it does it in a ludicrous, almost pretentious way that drops on the player’s shoulders an exercise in futile guesswork, with very little to no indication of how they should go about it.

The incompetence in execution on display here is certainly one of the things that contributes to such a frustrating experience: both gameplay and animations are as as wonky as it gets, even by point-and-click standards (it is also beyond annoying that you at times have to give a certain command at the exact time the game wants you to, otherwise it simply doesn’t trigger the consequence); the dialogue options often seem at odds and downright out of place right after a few significant beats; along the same lines, the voice acting, especially considering its calibre, misses the mark a ton when it comes to suitable emotional tone (McAvoy is particularly bad in this regard); playing time is a lot lengthier than a game and story of this nature required, which gradually leads you to a point when you simply want it to be over; and to top it all off, it is incredibly easy to get stuck in this game. I’m not talking about handholding here, which is usually counterproductive in games like this anyway. I’m talking about the game not offering even the slightest inkling of logical orientation at certain pivotal points after you’ve made significant discoveries.

All these issues already contribute to bringing your experience down in a tangible way, but to make matters worse, this isn’t even the most dreadful aspect in Twelve Minutes. That is left to the story itself, or rather, its conclusion - there’s no way to dive into this without doing it, so HEAVY SPOILERS throughout the rest of this paragraph. Unless you do a very specific thing at a very specific time during a very specific scene, nothing is even hinted to as a possible explanation for what is going on with the time loop. There are two distinct possibilities here. If what is happening / has happened is real, then pretty much nothing is offered and the player is left with a wrap up that is as confusing and anti-climatic as you can make it - how on earth could it be even slightly realistic that the protagonist is simultaneously his wife’s half-brother and their father’s killer, and not remember it just because he underwent some form of hypnosis? How can Willem Dafoe's character be both their father and the ‘cop’? Why the 12-minute time loop specifically? I could go on. If, on the other hand, the whole thing is nothing but a distorted representation of a damaged psyche attempting to deal with deep-seated trauma (possibly the most plausible scenario), or at best, a projection of what could happen in the future if certain paths are chosen, then to me this is even worse, since a) it offers even little in the way of outcome, and b) literally the only thing we have to go by to assume this is a short line of dialogue by Dafoe in the final scene with the main protagonist. A scene which is only triggered if you happen to look at the wall clock specifically as it hits midnight, and that apparently you can only get after you go through a couple other endings. Meaning most players will miss it. I’m sorry, but vague imagery connection here and there isn’t enough to take this leap in understanding. This possibility isn’t mysterious. It isn’t ‘deep’. It isn’t complex. It’s only lazy writing. And it still doesn’t explain the emotional relevance of the specific 12-minute time loop. If this was all in fact a mere interpretation of a troubled mind in dealing with what he had done in the past (at which point Dafoe’s character probably isn’t the father/cop but a therapist), this should’ve been executed with a lot more decisiveness rather than almost cowardly covertness.

The description of all the problems I talk about here is one half of why I’m so conflicted about my experience. If this were simply a bad game with no redeeming qualities, I’d say so and move on. But the frustrating thing about Twelve Minutes is that, underneath all these bad aspects, there is a plethora of interesting concepts aching to be appropriately explored. The infuriating nature of this game lies in its dichotomy. As ludicrous as the story conclusion is, and as annoying as the progression gets once you're past a certain point, it had the gift of keeping me absolutely glued on to it for the first 2,3 hours of gameplay, frothing at the prospect of wonderful possibilities. As basic as the setting is, there is a really well developed aura of complexity wrapped in an aesthetically tense atmosphere. And as mechanically mediocre as the gameplay turned out, the amount of possibilities to dig into that the game accounts for, especially in the ‘puzzle-solving’ aspect of the environment, is astonishing in an indie title (everyone can die all sorts of different deaths, objects can be combined in a whole bunch of different ways, elements can be discovered / explored in any sort of possible order, etc etc). At times, this almost reminded me of the emergent gameplay potential you get in the so-called immersive sims. To me that’s the worst part of it all: that the game shows such incredible, alluring promise in its early stages all throughout most of its second act, only for its execution to drive it against a wall of frustration and underwhelm by the end.

I’m not wholeheartedly saying you should skip this game. As I hope was made obvious in this post, there might be something in here for you to enjoy. And if you’re better equipped than me to integrate what it was trying to do, then perhaps you’ll end up even loving it. But personally, I find Twelve Minutes to be an interesting experiment which ultimately becomes a painful example of the ‘great concept, awful execution’ kind. And those are the worst games to experience, not because they leave you thinking about what they were, but because they leave you obsessing about what they could have been. 6/10