Twelve Minutes is a game about a man trapped in a time loop. Needless to say, it involves repetitiveness and a lot of trial and error to find all its secrets.
With that out of the way, since the trailer, this game intrigued me greatly. The idea of being stuck in these 10-ish minutes that will change the characters' lives so much was already interesting.
Once started the game I realized how with each "loop" I'd learn always more, making it easier, for example, to know what to use to prove to the wife that I am indeed stuck in a loop and have completely different events in that loop.
The game, like many point-and-click, has many interactions in between items, and by the end of it got a bit hard to guess some of the combinations left are not as they are not many, but feels very rewarding once figured out!
Not a long experience persé, but just as for games like Undertale, Journey, or Inside, an adventure I'll have a loving memory of.

Strongly suggested, with or without a deal on it, just be aware it's obviously repetitive and you can find yourself stuck as it's a puzzle game, after all.

8.5/10

Damn this was really bad. Got this one after seeing the hype on Twitch and Youtube, plus the cast had me really intrigued. I also usually love puzzle point and click games.

This wasn't it though. The time loop idea starts off pretty cool, because every loop you feel like you're learning something new and progressing. Later on it just gets REALLY repetitive and annoying, because you can't try new things and you gotta nail the exact sequence the developer wants. Also, sometimes you gotta repeat the same thing, which shouldn't be a thing in a point and click game, where you usually don't expect different results from the same thing.

The story starts out decent, then just gets really really dumb with a cheap plot twist and nonsense. Really don't know how they managed to get such a great cast involved in this atrocity of a story.

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.

Its like the devs thought adding more twists meant the game would be better, Ill say I was enjoying the trial and error and mystery until the big twist.

there's some technical issues like with characters reacting in certain ways even if you already present them with information for them not to act a certain way and its kind of hard to be specific without spoiling, but it gets frustrating when you know what to do but the game just doesn't register it.

also having to do the same scenes over and over gets annoying they kind of let you fast forward but not really, like it would be nice to be able to skip when you already did something.

the amount of bad ends is fun though and its presentation is nice.

voice acting could be better which I blame the direction because the actors themselves are good unless they phoned it in because it was a video game.

I enjoyed my time with it but that last twist really knocks it down a star or half a star at least