Reviews from

in the past


This review contains spoilers

what if we gave a 2009 kongregate dev excessive budget, polish, and access to actors for his next project. not really about anything at all, just another egotistical flex from annapurna looking to make the medium palatable to the disinterested, writing betrays that techbro lack of humanity inherent to some working in AAA. it's hard for the people out there in relationships with their half-sister who refuse to tell their partners about their blood relation.

by far the funniest thing about this game is if you get the ending where you confess to the cop, he immediately goes 'you killed your father and married your sister?' and instead of exacting revenge or becoming furious he just kind of acquiesces. 'this is too weird for me guys, im just gonna take my leave'

i feel so bad for willem dafoe dude

Feels like one of those Netflix originals you watch out of muted interest in the premise, but ends up being so dry and unaffecting that you forget all about it as the credits roll. Why did they get James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley to do American accents lol were their weird performances really worth it.

Within the first 5 seconds of freedom this game gave me, I immediately picked up the kitchen knife and used it in probably the worst way possible. The game didn’t stop me and it also didn't seem to care, and neither did I. But that was probably the worst way possible to start this game, because as it dragged on for hours the main thought in my head was, “We were cooking on the first route” which should have ended the game. Instead I was trapped in a torture chamber of nonsensical solutions and horrible dialogue delivery, with an ending that wasn’t even interesting enough to be worth the painful drawl. The image of Daisy Ridley’s weird polygonal feet are scarred into my brain forever.

While I find the trial and error bit of gameplay to be rather neat, it’s done in such an excruciatingly painful way here. Every do-over lacks the ability to skip the cinematics so you’ll feel your body rapidly age with every scene you’re forced to watch on repeat. The lack of options your character gets to work with are frustrating and unrealistic. The characters shamble around like zombies and there’s zero way to speed up the process to get back to a later segment in the timeline aside from some line skips. I guess had they implemented such a silly concept then the game would quite literally be 12 minutes long. Instead, you sit through hours of trying out the smallest changes, only to awkwardly miss-click something and have to redo the whole process again. With every make-out session your wife assaults you with unprompted at the beginning of every loop, the more reptilian I felt while playing this game. How icky it made me feel while I slowly became an iguana.

You’d think a game that allows you to stab the shit out of your wife in the first five seconds would have literally anything to say about violence or impatience or domestic abuse or literally anything? Maybe it’d point a finger at me and go, “You’re part of the problem!!” and question my immediate conclusion to stretch the game's choices to it’s most inhumane limits. Nope. It meant nothing, like it was just something cool you could do for the sake of it. Violence is actually the only way to siphon any useful information from any of the characters, in fact the peaceful communicative solutions don’t even open up until after you’ve murdered so it’s not like it’s not encouraged. But, it literally doesn’t acknowledge this as something awful nor does it affect your character in any real way. The game does not care, so why should you? Allowing me to start the game with the ability to do this really set itself up for failure. It never challenged my thought process, so I just simply progressed with not giving a shit. It's almost like game interactivity has a way of affecting the player if it's implemented in a meaningful way instead of just existing for "artistic" shock value.

At the end of the day, does it even matter? I went through all this effort just to land on a conclusion that I said out loud as a joke. When the twist happened and that joke ended up being the reality, oh fuck off. This is it. It’s just a game that let me murder my wife in the first 5 seconds of it and nothing else. Riveting stuff, guys.

How they got James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe, and Daisy Ridley involved in this is insanely hilarious. They sound like they’re phoning it in the whole time, like they don’t even believe in this game’s bullshit themselves. It’s artistic, I’ll give it that. But, am I buying it? No. I ate chocolate mousse while a man screamed at my wife and hogtied her to the floor right in front of me. Neat.

A video game that boldly dares to go where no game has gone before... being violent to women

This review contains spoilers

another game that joins the incestcore after Trails series


Using a timeloop narrative in games makes a lot of sense, because they kind of exist on the player level for most games anyway, as a result of checkpoints or save scumming. Go forward, die, come back earlier, and try something you learned to succeed a second time. The biggest issue here is that Twelve Minutes is trying to be a timeloop movie, not a timeloop game.

Imagine you're making a movie. You have 4 "loops" of the main character trying out a plan. The first 3 times it fails because of some variable he didn't anticipate, before succeeding on the fourth. What do you do to make sure it's not boring? Simple, a quick montage showing what worked and how the protagonist corrects their mistakes until they succeed. Twelve Minutes can't do this. Instead, you play completely through 4 loops, with the game throwing sometimes unforseen obstacles your way or characters not reacting to your changes until you finally get it right. It's exactly as tedious as it sounds, if not more. This on its own can still be compelling. The game could've focused itself around the hopeless tedium of clockwork precision, of the ultimately soul sucking feeling of repeatedly failing to make sure life is orchestrated in the perfect way. But it's too focused on being a twisty Hitchcockian thriller that ultimately repeatedly shoots its pacing in the foot. It doesn't help that the narrative being told also just kind of sucks on its own, particularly by the end.

Despite Luis Antonio's outspoken desire to push the medium forward, he wasn't able to conceive of a game that would give form to deeper meaning, instead making a story dominated by it's game mechanics — which resulted in uninspired puzzle box storytelling and shock value —, while the cinematic framing actively crippled the satisfaction of play by adding too much poorly conceived friction in the player's interactions with the game.


(also, there's a bit where the protagonist looks at a window while it's raining and says "heavy rain" and you can't convince me the director is not your average david cage enjoyer)

some spoilers below, which im not tagging because i don't care about them and neither should you, but if having the game spoiled will turn you away from playing it, then i have done you a favor, and you're very welcome.

here's the positive stuff: willem dafoe does a pretty good job here, and the other actors are overall decent. their talents are utterly wasted here, and there are many line reads that land awkwardly, but overall it's fine. that's the absolute best thing i have to say about this mess.

playing this game is a slog. there are a lot of frustrating moments where you know what you need to do, you've uncovered the information, but it turns out you needed to click on an item three more times for your character to piece it together properly (literally), and then go use the info elsewhere.

i could forgive some of that frustration if the story was interesting, but aside from going "ah, that's fucked up" when you figure out the main twist, the rest of it falls flat, and it only goes downhill afterwards. and no, i wouldn't call it ambitious. it's cliche-ridden, masturbatory, and derivative.

none of it is given any sense of metaphorical gravity, and the story told is pretty heinous, not because the unnecessary trauma porn simply exists, but because the trauma porn serves no purpose that justifies its presence, nor is the quality of writing enough to redeem the experience in general.

drugging your pregnant sister/wife repeatedly is a critical path requirement. watching her get killed while you hide in a closet is a critical path requirement. torturing a man is a critical path requirement. gruesomely murdering your pregnant sister/wife with a kitchen knife is optional, but available if you feel like doing that for no reason (and you might be likely to try it if you don't yield to a walkthrough and go into "use everything on everything else" mode).

all of this could be used effectively by a more skilled writer. i'm not the kind of person to say story beats are inherently off-limits in art. but if you're gonna come packing, you better be able to justify going there. this clearly isn't a shock value trolling game, they're trying to make film major/psych minor bullshit, but you don't get a pass just because you threw a Kubrick reference on the carpet. you know why we still watch Kubrick films even knowing he was a huge piece of shit? because they're good movies. you gotta earn it. oh, the fucking paintings change over time? ooooh, does that get used anywhere? no? fuck off.

the gameplay and design are bad, the story and writing are bad, this is just a failure on all fronts.

i bought it on steam, but i know its also on gamepass, if you have that. that said, i'd skip this mess entirely, even if you can play it for free. if you want compelling and profound art from a small team in which you know a man is coming to kill you, go play adios instead. if you want a time loop game where the time loop is a worthwhile mechanic, go play outer wilds or majora's mask instead. all three of those games are masterpieces, especially compared to this garbage.

It's like The Big Lebowski (1998) but instead of peeing on the carpet, they kill his wife.

The only redeeming thing about Twelve Minutes is that it's on Game Pass, and thus I didn't have to waste $25 on this load of crap.

I streamed this for some friends and one of them called the twist as a joke. When it actually happened we just kinda sat there in disbelief for a few minutes.

Willem Dafoe star in better games challenge?

Twelve Minutes, the first game directed by veteran Luis António, frustratingly and miserably uses itself in a narrative and thematic loop in order to achieve unsatisfactory and totally derisory results - even if, above all, it takes itself seriously.

In addition to a plot with several holes and unbelievable twists, the game has one of the worst gameplays Annapurna has ever offered, at least 10 years behind in game design (including critically failing on trivial matters), and never, I repeat, never exploring any of its own points thematically. The loop is a tool, not the object, which is a serious mistake.

This is, of course, not to mention the fact that it doesn't even touch on themes that are crucial to its story, never, for example, mentioning its sadism, violence and abnormality, just accepting them as elements that don't change what it's trying to tell - again, another serious (and, frankly, amateurish) mistake.

If only it made fun of itself, but not even that. Twelve Minutes wants to be taken seriously, very seriously, through art direction that uses morbid tones and cold sets, cinematic acting scenes and, wow, violence and swearing. All of this as if it had no less screen time with minimal depth than its own 12-minute loop, both in narrative and gameplay - it's empty, through and through, however much the passively charming style and dramatic performances may try to manipulate you into believing that it's not.

You, the protagonist, kill all the relevant characters in the game, in one way or another, at one time or another, and the only, only consequence or mention of these events comes in the form of an apology. An apology from the protagonist himself, made hours and hours after the start of the loop - hours that 80% of the time, and that number is no exaggeration, will be incessant repetition without any use.

In other words, it's a game that doesn't even try to care about femicide, murder, suicide or cancer; themes that, since present at alarming levels, could easily be explored to the full, but are treated only as tools to tell a story that doesn't even work in the most basic sense imaginable.

Spoiler warning: Of course, because completely ignoring any emotional sensitivity or social issue was surely the most desirable way to conduct a text about a man who is hypnotized by his father, kills him and marries his own sister, falling, years later, into a hellish time loop to discover that he has done so.

In short: playing Twelve Minutes sucks, with an outdated point-and-click and poor use of the time loop, and what's worse, it doesn't even make a point of hiding this fact behind a minimally decent script - because, in fact, it's as shallow as a saucer. Luis António completely takes away the point of a game being a game and a story being worth telling - especially as he's part of a publisher like Annapurna, capable of casting even Willem Dafoe and giving his protégés freedom of time and creativity.

I dont want to revel in this game's failures, but I find it interesting in how dated it is. It was apparently in development for 7 years and it feels like it--12 Minutes is a ceolacanth of 2010s critical darling narrative game design.

Multiple twists as the primary driver of interest in the story? Liberal use of dark/twisted events to "earn" the story its artistic merit? Fixation on a single emotional beat, at the expense of variety/depth? Clamoring for Hollywood prestige by casting stars who are clearly out of their element?

I feel that the time-loop concept has legs, but its hard to give the game much benefit of the doubt when the performances really are just that bad. Daisy Ridley responds to her husband being choked to death like I do when my cat scratches my furniture. Willem Dafoe belts out strange breathless sound bites that cut off half a second too early. Clicking rapidly on a home invader as he attempts to murder your wife results in a comedically-timed "Sir?! Sir?! Sir?!"

I'd feel dishonest calling it BAD, but I expected much more.

This review contains spoilers

Soooo, what can I say: I’m disappointed. The premise, the general story idea and how things unfold are good enough, and this should’ve been a triumph, especially with a-lister voice actors like that, but the lazy implementation of the practically only gameplay mechanic hold this back significantly by putting you through tedious progression filled with bits that destroy the atmosphere of an otherwise tense storytelling.
I don’t want to talk a lot about the plot in detail, instead want to reiterate what I meant previously. Dialogue Trees are a big part of this game and of how you progress through the story. It’s a pity that those lines you speak often times feel unnatural and almost robotic, especially in the context of entire conversations it always threw me off that the tone changed drastically. One example: your character sees something really heavy, is devastated and almost cries, rambles a bit. Immediately after you click to observe something else and he’s back to his regular voice, with a little bit of humor - it destroys the entire impact of that scene. Stuff like that happens regularly, sometimes so absurdly that it made me angry: you find out that you can use a certain photo to change the course of a conversation. This works, but only if you let that photo hang on the fridge, if you have it in your pocket, the character you need to show it to, doesn’t accept that prompt anymore and knocks you out - only for you to repeat the entire thing all over again.
It just feels lazy and unnecessary. The game feels a lot like classical point and click adventures, in the sense that you have to do things in a very specific order to progress. It’s fine in a scenario where you can repeat that process at your own pace and try out a multitude of things, but in a kind of roguelike context it gets tedious reaaaaally fast. From the third or fourth time on I was already annoyed by hearing the same lines over and over again. There are no shortcuts and expect to tinker around quite a lot before you find your way through this puzzle, unless you are maybe a super brain.
I can’t shake the feeling that instead of spending money on famous voice actors, the game would’ve needed more development time and polish. None of these things would’ve been unfixable.
In the end i’d probably recommend watching a playthrough of this rather than playing it for yourself, because it’s still worth experiencing - not so much worth playing it though.

A full YouTube walkthrough of this game is ~1 hour and 40 minutes long. You know what else is an hour and 40 minutes long? The movie "Groundhog Day." Go watch that instead.


“Is this what other video games are like?” was my girlfriend’s only response after we finished this. It’s the first game she’s beaten that wasn’t on the Nintendo Switch.

Like many people around the world, coronavirus made her into a gamer - a combination of lockdown boredom and watching me play video games every single day of the week convinced her to find out what all the fuss was about. She’d played plenty of Mega Drive and PlayStation as a child, but, like most normal people, fell away from the hobby when school, sex and other pressing responsibilities began to take hold.

The Nintendo Switch is, of course, the ideal console for re-introducing someone to the world of video games - capital-G Gamers may rankle against Nintendo’s minimalist UI for dummies, baby-friendly options and softly-softly in-game tutorials, but watching a newly-minted member of our organisation come to grips with gaming via Nintendo’s safe, friendly little ecosystem makes it undeniably clear what The Big N are up to when they remind you that “A” means “Jump” 10 hours into Super Mario Galaxy. A twenty-second irritation for you is a life-saving clarification for someone who still has to hold the controller up to their face to read the buttons.

Within 18 months, Nintendo has gradually guided my girlfriend through the worlds of Animal Crossing, Super Mario Odyssey Captain Toad, Bowser’s Fury and many other great wee games, eventually climaxing in her getting a near-100% completion stat on Breath of the Wild last week. Unfortunately, as the daily blood-thirst for Yet Another Nintendo Direct proves, Nintendo only make so many games - even for more laid-back fans - and my girlfriend has near enough run the Switch’s first-party well dry.

Which is where the Xbox Series S comes in - while peering through pop-ups and paywalls at countless click-baiting “Best 2021 Games” lists to find new things to enjoy, we found that a lot of interesting stuff that appealed to us - Sable, Forgotten City, Psychonauts 2, Twelve Minutes - were heading straight past the Nintendo Switch and only coming to Xbox and PC. While I have a pretty good PC that could reasonably play all these games, I would never willingly subject a human being I care about to PC Gaming. So we bought an Xbox Series S instead.

In many ways, the Series X|S is the Switch’s antithesis, for worse and for better - a confusing smorgasbord of hardware options that are laser-focused on performance and deeply-integrated online components, with a homescreen that relentlessly bombards you with options, adverts and other worthless media tiles - it’s genuinely amusing that a games console hides its video games in a sub-menu that sits alongside Disney+ suggestions (when you haven’t even downloaded or enrolled Disney+ on the console!) and adverts for games you already own within said sub-menu. Needless to say, starting an Xbox game can be a daunting task for anyone who’s used to just pressing the power button and clicking on a big picture of the game they want to play. Between my “””smart””” TV and the Xbox, I now have to run a gamut of broken advertising just to play a little bit of Blast Corps in glorious 4K. The next generation of gaming is here, folks!

The Series S would be an outright contemptible little device if Microsoft hadn’t essentially mastered their ability to give console players a comfortable PC-like experience of near-infinite diversity in near-infinite combinations, all from the comfort of a controller. This thing has the best multi-generational compatibility of any console I’ve ever owned - surpassing even the mighty Nintendo DS and O.G. PS3. It’s confounding/astounding that I could, technically, if I really wanted, sign in to a workplace Teams call on a device that simultaneously allows me to swap between Halo 2, Daytona USA, Symphony of the Night and Halo Infinite. I could give my daily team brief using a Turtle Beach headset plugged into an Xbox controller while playing Conker’s Bad Fur Day, if I really wanted to! Does anyone want that? I don’t think so, but Microsoft have made it possible, for some reason! The next generation of gaming is here, folks! (If you can play Microsoft Teams on an Xbox console, does that technically qualify it for inclusion in the Backloggd archives? I’d love to read those Top Reviews.)

On a console that neatly demonstrates many of the things that make playing modern video games a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare, Twelve Minutes is more or less a perfect package of everything that’s shit about those video games themselves: repetition of mindless tasks; the banal trial-and-error dragging-and-dropping of [USE] [ITEM] [OBJECT] that has plagued adventure gaming for three decades; trying to click on things that are too small; clicking on wrong things and having to slowly watch wrong things unfold; watching polygonal automatons walk slowly to their destination; watching polygonal automatons bump and jerk against and around each other; watching clunky plot unfold at sub-iceberg paces; watching accomplished actors of stage and screen recite from torn-out pages of school play dialogue; hearing that same dialogue again, and again, and again on your way back to the destination of your next clunky plot point; cognitively-dissonant clashes between gameplay and narrative; and, of course, one of video gaming’s most reliable staples - unnecessary, senseless and gratuitous violence against defenceless women.

A game about a police officer exploitatively wielding his authority to prey on a woman in myriad horrific ways is never gonna come out at the “right” time, but playing Twelve Minutes in the ongoing moment of the Sarah Everard case feels so sickeningly sour. It’s morbidly impressive how quickly the game lets you watch a woman get handcuffed and choked out. It’s even more impressive how quickly the game gives you unprovoked player-driven options for violence against your own wife! The next generation of gaming is here, folks!

Early on in Twelve Minutes, “a prestige mystery-thriller timeloop game” (Annapurna Interactive press release, 2021), we realised you can grab a knife and stab your wife while she sits on the couch reading a book. Don’t worry gamers! We had to do it to gain more precious intel about a pocket watch that helps move the mystery along! It’s wholly justifiable woman-murder! There’s a mystery to solve! When we worked this part out, there was no “aha!” moment that usually comes with solving a puzzle in a video game. Just an instinctive revulsion of “do we have to do this?” - and not in an introspective, meaningful way, like, say, that fateful R2 press at the end of Snake Eater. Just a pained, mindless “ugh” while dragging the knife to the wife. A far cry from turning into a funny little jumping cabbage to collect power moons in Super Mario Odyssey. Video games provide infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Nonetheless, we persisted on the assumption that the game would address its own inhumanity in pursuit of a greater goal or message. It’s a “prestige” game, after all! This is the kind of high-calibre gaming that only the next generation of video games hardware can provide! Of course, it never did - Twelve Minutes is never interested in examining itself, even though it has all the endlessly looping time in the world to do it. Another example within the prior example - American Husband (Scotland’s James McAvoy) resists the player’s first suggestion to carry out the act of wife-stabbing with a weak-willed “No…” refusal before capitulating on the second attempt. What does that mean, really? I hoped the game was taking a page from Deltarune’s playbook by suggesting that the player and the player-controlled husband were distinct entities in the Twelve Minutes world, but alas - we already established that this game is a portrait of every blemish and pimple on the face of video games. There’s no space for interesting thoughts here! Ignore that cheap gesture in the general direction of drama and get back to stabbing your wife! You need to stab her to get The Facts! You’ll be absolved of your crimes on the next loop anyway.

Fortunately, the game’s incoherent and incompetent tone often comes to your rescue whenever it forces you to do something rotten. Immediately after shanking his wife (for the third time) for having the temerity to read a book on the couch, we commanded our witless hero to sit down and eat his chocolate mousse. He remarked on how tasty it was, then read a book on the couch with his dead wife, behaving more like an auto-piloting Sim than a Serious Protagonist. It was a very good bit of morbidly dissonant ludo-narrative giggling, and a rare moment of joy in a game that is trying so very hard to be mature. Remember the Groundhog Day montage where Bill Murray trial-and-errors his way around diners and offices? All those bits in Edge of Tomorrow where Tom Cruise bit the dust in increasingly sadistic and silly ways? Weren’t they fun! No room for that here. We’ve got women to kick in the ribs!

I’m not opposed to video games and other artworks depicting our ugliest inhumanities, but I feel like it has to be to some meaningful end. Twelve Minutes is so obsessed with presenting itself as maturely as possible that it ultimately comes off as immaturely meaningless as it possibly could - no amount of prestigious acting credits or allusions to brutal murder and rape can save it from coming across like a Christopher Moltisanti spec script. Like a corny mafia movie, Twelve Minutes lets you watch a woman get punched, kicked, choked and stabbed - again, and again, and again, and again, and again (Achievement Unlocked, by the way!) until you’re bored. Then it’ll introduce something about incest, for some reason. The perfect introduction to the world of video games beyond Nintendo’s borders. The next generation of gaming is here, folks!

This review contains spoilers

Kiss wife. Life good. Wife admit murder. Kill wife. Wife is sister. Sister gone. Stand in wardrobe... Repeat

I knew I was in for some dogshit when the title faded bits out to just leave letters spelling LIES. Fuckin' grow up. The original trailer was dead interesting, but what we got was some three part ITV drama stuff. What if instead of a story being good, it simply had a couple of twists ye saw coming a mile away? What if it was also a slog to go over the same dialogue again and again to try and find out the single trigger to progress to the next loop? Please.

Annapurna get their dick sucked far too much for a company that makes my brain go "The A24 of Gaming", and no I can't explain exactly what that means. Fuck you.

Wasting James McAvoy on an American accent. Shameful.

Backloggd discord server voice chat

This is like playing through a Mario Maker puzzle level made by a two year old with almost no guidance or satisfying solutions, except here you get a terrible twist at the end to round the entire package out.

the most fun you can have is killing your poor wife, taking the desert she made, hiding in the closet and then waiting for Willem Dafoe to find your degenerate ass gorging on choccy-pud with not a shred of remorse for killing your wife.

ooh its ~art~ look at me i got ~actors~

At first I was genuinely enjoying the time loop gimmick and how it uses puzzle solving through trial and error but just when it seemed like the story was taking a decent resolution it resorted to one of the most comically terrible twists I’ve experienced in any piece of narrative that even Willem Dafoe’s character was taken back by this and just leaves the game.

Never have I seen a video game try so hard to be seen as a “legit” piece of storytelling or artform and just drop the ball hard by going a route that whatever quality the narrative (and game as a whole) had beforehand just dissipates in the air.

It's hard to imagine that I'll end up being as disappointed in another video game this year than I was with Twelve Minutes. The potential of utilising a timeloop with a mystery based point and click game would seem like a great mixture of genre and mechanics (and I still think it could be), but you'd be forgiven for thinking the opposite based on this.

The obvious problem here is that you're likely going to have to repeat your actions every now and then, something which has the potential to be a little bit monotonous. And alongside that, the game falls into the genre trap of having very specific solutions for certain puzzles which leads to potentially having to redo the loop entirely. There are a couple of ways to skip ahead but these are very specific and they don't save as much time as you might think.

Even then there was potential to come out of the game with a more positive outlook. Games of this genre can overcome issues like these if story is still intriguing, or the game's writing is able to keep you interested in what might come next. Unfortunately it doesn't take very long to realise that Twelve Minutes has neither of those either.

Part of the reason why these elements don't hit is due to this repetition, where you're provided with info dumps in one loop and then spend the next few working out how to apply that information, meaning there are sizable chunks of gameplay where you're learning nothing other than that a specific way to progress doesn't work. The other major reason is the reliance on multiple twists to further the plot, as well as relying on some of the more cliché mystery/thriller story elements, neither of which are earned. Sure they may theoretically explain away some of the unnatural and flat dialogue (I don't blame McEvoy, Ridley or Dafoe for this, to be clear) but in no way does it come across intentional.

All in all, it's just a massive shame that such an interesting concept ends up being bogged down by an amateurish story. It's not quite David Cage levels of bad but it's also not exactly streets away either...

I was always intrigued to try this game after seeing the launch trailers years ago but I completely forgot about it until I saw it on sale on steam today and thought id finally give it a shot.

Twelve minutes revolves around a man stuck in a time loop where a cop comes to his house and kills him and his wife every twelve minutes as per the title. There is a deeper story to unfold and each loop has you searching for more clues to discover the quite frankly strange twist in the end. Im a sucker for a good murder mystery plot and pairing that with a time loop works quite well in execution. I think that the twist in the end is shocking but was a very weird way for the developers to go with it when they could of removed "That part" and made it work regardless.

I expected this to be a small indie game but was really shocked to see James MacAvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Defoe were voicing the main characters. MacAvoy and Ridley are putting on accents and I would of never guessed it was them if the game hadn't told me but you can recognise Willem Defoe from a mile off, but as always he gives a very good performance with the limited dialogue. As do MacAvoy and Ridley and they have decent chemistry during their character interactions.

Its a simple point and click game style with no controls other than the mouse. I think its good that they never overcomplicated the controls as it would of felt needless. Im a big fan of the gameplay format of going into each loop with more knowledge and slowly piecing everything together.

Visually its quite lacking, its all from a top down perspective and the whole game bar a few scenes takes place in the same area so nothing crazy to work with. Nothing really to note score wise but I do quite like the theme as the credits play. Technically I noticed quite a lot of lag/frame drop but nothing game breaking by any means.

There are I believe 7 endings, three of which are very similar and the rest can only be achieved at certain parts during the game. I got two endings and might go back to get the more unique ones that dont require me to play the whole game again.

All in all Twelve Minutes is an enjoyable point and click mystery with an interesting plot and characters. Very much a one and done type of game so I would recommend when it is on sale as I wouldn't pay £20 for it.

Longo Suspiro. Por onde eu começo?

Que decepção. A gente passou tanto tempo vendo teasers desse jogo que prometia tanto e entregou... uma bagunça?

A premissa é muito boa. Um mistério pra resolver num time loop? Opa, manda pra cá! Atores bons fazendo as vozes dos personagens? Perfeito!

Só esqueceram de criar uma história boa pra tudo isso. Eu não vou entrar em spoilers, mas eles pegaram dois dos piores tropes de reviravoltas existentes e colocaram os DOIS na mesma história. E ainda por cima quiseram disfarçar de arte, de algo profundo. É só realmente muito triste o quão pretensioso ele tentou ser.

E o gameplay que parece interessante e envolvente no começo, logo se torna impossivelmente chato e tedioso. Não me envergonho de dizer que procurei um walkthrough no final, pois não aguentava mais fazer e-xa-ta-men-te as mesmas ações de novo e de novo e de novo.
E tem muitos puzzles que são horríveis e arbitrários. É desses jogos que se você não fizer precisamente o que o desenvolvedor pensou, não vai dar certo. Ruim demais, de verdade.

Isso sem falar em como duas resoluções principais para o puzzle resolvem você cometer violência contra sua esposa ou deixar alguém cometer essa violência e só assistir. E, sinceramente, não precisava. Tinham outros jeitos na própria mecânica do jogo de obter as respostas para essas duas questões, mas eles optam pela violência. Isso já é altamente questionável, pra dizer o mínimo, mas ai a história termina do jeito que foi e... bom... fica muito difícil defender.

Obras sobre loops temporais costumam ser sobre uma jornada de auto conhecimento dos protagonistas. E, ok, não PRECISA ser assim, da pra tentar fazer uma história de mistério, claro. Mas, pra mim, é algo meio intrínseco a esse recurso narrativo a coisa da auto descoberta, de chegar a um momento de catarse. De ser forçado a encarar seus medos, seus defeitos. E bom... meio que tem isso aqui, mas não faz parte do loop, é o final do jogo, a reviravolta. Talvez eu só esteja sendo amarga porque é uma reviravolta realmente muito merda. Talvez se fosse melhor a estrutura funcionasse. Mas enfim, parece que nem isso eles conseguiram acertar.

Uma tristeza tanto potencial desperdiçado. Realmente uma pena.

I have never played a game I had felt so passionately about recommending to other people

until the ending which genuinely makes me wonder if I would recommend this to anyone



I was so excited for this game when it was first revealed. Like, really, really excited. I even deliberately tried to avoid any content after the reveal trailer as best as I could. So, safe to say, this game is my biggest disappointment in terms of expectations and reality. ever. I stopped playing this around an hour into the game and watched the rest of it on YouTube, skipping furiously through the video in utter disbelief.

There is nothing clever here, nothing even remotely interesting. This is just plain cheap. One of the required solutions to progress literally is "watch your pregnant wife get beaten on the floor in first person until plot exposition happens" and it never get's talked about or even remotely thematized in the pretentious, self-indulgant and plainly stupid piece of writing that is this games ending. This feels like a David Cage game, but even more misogynistic, if that's possible. It's just... it's just plain bad. This game made the Annapurna catalogue a lot worse and I'll be more vary of the games they publish in the future.

This review contains spoilers

WHAT IN THE REVERSE "FROM UP ON POPPY HILL" WAS THAT

Overall, the ride of this game works. But the ending just... huh??

The game was landing really well for me until that last part. If the player character really is the half-brother, how was he not aware of this? When the Dahlia reveal happens, he's clearly shocked and upset. It's a surprise to him, he wasn't withholding information.

In one of the endings, the dad character (btw, is he the cop??? Or are they two different people??) does some new age homeopathic hypnotism nonsense to him to make him forget everything. But that can't be the reason he doesn't remember, because he didn't kill the dad in that scenario, so he could never arrive at the events in the apartment after that. I made sure I got every ending, but none of them seemed to have an explanation for the memory loss or the father model (hair) swapping with the cop model (bald) in the variations of the same flashback scene.

I was so ready for this game to stick the landing. But unfortunately for Daisy Ridley, that's two projects in a row (that I've seen her in) where bizarre, inexplicable family revelations derail the whole thing.

5/5 ride, 2/5 resolution/ending.

Um game com potencial tão grande, mas infelizmente muito mal executado. É o primeiro que eu abandonei e faço uma review aqui.

Os primeiros minutos de jogatina são muito interessantes, com essa premissa de looping temporal e a descoberta de cada parte da história, porém isso (pra mim) acaba ser tornando um ponto negativo. Além da gameplay DESASTROSA que chega a ser um pouco incomoda, parece que você e o próprio personagem não conseguem "evoluir" com todos os pontos que você passa a conhecer daquela situação depois de cada looping. Não sei se só eu que senti esses problemas ou se joguei errado de alguma forma, mas essa foi minha experiência.