Every time I tried to be creative with the game, nothing I did gave me any progress. At one point, I spent over an hour repeatedly going through the loop, trying desperately to find the one thing I missed. The time limit can be frustrating, and each cycle’s repeating dialogue becomes very grating. Each run through the game lasts just over 10 minutes, which feels like a harsh time restriction when you can’t decipher your next move. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing, but when you get stuck, you feel trapped in your own time loop. The game expects you to figure out these solutions exactly as it wants you to, which can feel limiting when you want to experiment with the environment. There are very exact solutions to each puzzle, such as show this photograph to this character, and only then can you unlock the dialogue tree you need. My hair-brained schemes and experiments – such as trying to pour a glass of water on the hardwood floor inside the front door to trip the cop – were not recognized by the game. However, mechanically, the game never goes quite as far as I wanted. If you can remember the location of each key item in the apartment and the core questions that need answering, you can make solid progress through each run, discovering new revelations as you get better at the puzzle. Memorization works better in the long run. Progress comes down to memorization and experimentation. Dafoe, in particular, plays an excellent and scary villain who’s both deadly and aggressive, amplifying your sense of urgency through each loop. Solid writing and great performances by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe carry the game for its roughly six-hour runtime. Twelve Minutes is a point-and-click adventure game, and so you point and click your way around the three-room apartment, trying to convince your wife of the time loop, stop the police officer from killing you, and unravel the mystery at your front door. In an act of utter police brutality, he begins choking you, but at the moment of death, you wake up at your front door just a few minutes earlier. She insists she didn’t do it, but the cop wrestles both of you to the ground. He says he’s looking for a pocket watch belonging to her father. A man claiming to be a police officer accuses your wife of murdering her father eight years ago. It’s a special night because, as you sit down to eat, she reveals she’s pregnant. Arriving home to your small apartment, your wife has made your favorite dessert. The beginning of Twelve Minutes is immediately captivating. So goes Twelve Minutes, a fascinating game that unravels its story 12 minutes at a time. On the other hand, the experience can be frustrating when you want nothing more than some shred of progress. On the one hand, being stuck creates a connection between mechanics, story, and player engagement rarely possible in video games like your protagonist, you’re trapped, both caught in a never-ending cycle you are unable to break. Getting stuck in a narrative time loop game is a unique sort of hell.
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