I'm kind of shocked that this game has mostly negative reception. It's quite an inventive experience that takes a tried and true storytelling trope into the realm of the suspense thriller. Less Groundhog Day, more Vertigo.

This game is not optimized well for iOS, which made the experience a bit worse for me, but I could get over it. Every time I tried to use the item menu, I would pull down the notification center on my phone, which would pause the game and exit out of the item menu. It was frustrating but not game-breaking. I wish I played it on PC, but whatever.

The voice acting is phenomenal, though James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley are nigh unrecognizable with their American accents. I think that Ridley's starring role as Wife was the better of the two performances by far. But Willem Dafoe, as always, steals the spotlight with every single line of dialogue. I thought the narrative was very well done, though I must admit the big twist isn't very well-telegraphed and kind of came out of nowhere. Still, I gasped when I made the connection. It was a real gut punch that I don't normally get with anything anymore. That alone is worthy of praise.

Gameplay-wise, some of the puzzles are a bit obtuse. I never even thought to turn the bedroom light on, then off, then on again, and that's a crucial part of the progression. Nothing tells you that that's what you're supposed to do, and it was one of the few things I had to look up. I also had to look up the final action to get the ending, which was even more obtuse than the light switch. At least with the light switch, I can see you maybe coming across it by accident. But the ending? No way anybody came across it organically.

I had quite a few "a-ha!" moments, though. Stuff like putting the sleeping pills in the water, using the knife to pry open the vents, and proving the time loop to Wife with the thunderstorm. When it works, it works. It just doesn't always work.

Okay this is legitimately quite a decent game. It really rewards you for paying attention to the littlest details and going through the whole trial and error process of it all can feel really good once you've finally pieced a puzzle together.

The story is also legitimately engaging and interesting to unravel.... Until you get to the uhhhh.... Yeah. That plot twist. Which, just why? Why did they decide this? Why couldn't they just stick to the murder? Like, I kinda get where they were coming from and I can see what they were thinking but like, I can't take it seriously after that like wtf lmao.

Also James McAvoy, sorry man but you can not voice act for shit. The other two are fine enough.


Disappointing, this game could've been great but uhhhh yeah no lol.

Where to even start with this one... I'd describe Twelve Minutes as 'fascinating'. It was a truly painful experience to get through at times, and yet I don't regret having played it at all. "So Bad It's Good" games don't really exist in my opinion, but Twelve Minutes might be the game that comes closest to crossing that line. And yet, while I was playing, my main thought was along the lines of "well this isn't that bad I guess". But in the cold light of the morning after, I'm really struggling to think of redeeming qualities to Twelve Minutes.

I started making an effort to play more games last year, and I quickly discovered that I absolutely love time-loop games and intricately crafted puzzles based on information; in particular the excellent Forgotten City and the near-perfect Outer Wilds. And there is some of the spirit of those games locked away in Twelve Minutes somewhere. If you by chance played this at exactly the pace and in the exact order that the developer intends, you'd probably think this was pretty good (plot notwithstanding). The puzzles are all there, you get into the groove of gradually working out how to execute the perfect loop in a way honestly quite similar to in The Forgotten City. But it just feels like the dev forgot to account for the fact that the player is a free agent with a brain cell or two.

I was constantly finding solutions to puzzles that were going to come up later, but most of the time if you solve a puzzle at the 'wrong time' the solution just won't work? I could know exactly which piece of information I could use to force a character to open up and tell me something, and then not have that option come up in their dialogue tree. Even more egregious than that, there were a few times where I got stuck, because I had already tried the obvious solution to whatever puzzle I was working on and found that it didn't work... then after a few loops of failure, try the exact same thing again in the same way and get different results. There are also a few times where you have to do things the game has actively conditioned you not to do; I learned pretty early on that speaking to the cop while he's talking to the wife is a bad idea, only to find out that exactly that was a solution to one of the end game puzzles. The game is so rigid in this regard that at one point I had a hilarious moment; the cop demanded the wife show him an item that was in my inventory, so I figured I should probably take it out of my inventory and show it him, at which point he punched me to death for daring to interrupt him.

It feels like the dev never got a real human to playtest this, and just assumed all players would think exactly the same and go at exactly the pace they intended. Freedom should be a core principle of these kinds of games, and it's definitely attainable; The Forgotten City has a fairly similar mechanical and narrative structure to Twelve Minutes, with a significantly more complex web of characters and relationships, and yet you can finish that in one loop if you know what you're doing. Twelve Minutes is so fake that the minimum number of loops is (I believe) 8.

This apparent misunderstanding of the time-loop subgenre isn't the only issue with Twelve Minutes though by any stretch. For most of the game, the story and dialogue are... hackneyed and cheesy but serviceable. They provide enough intrigue that I was genuinely interested in getting to the next loop to find out more. But I don't think it would be hyperbole to say it might have the worst ending in video game history, and its so seismically stupid and bad that it poisons the entire game in retrospect.

The game also has an issue with respect. There are some really dark themes here; torture, domestic abuse and questions about consent. I don't think anything should be off-limits in media, but you need to treat things like this with respect. I'll try to step around spoilers here, but some of the puzzles in the midgame involve you doing some pretty horrible things to your wife, but this is never called out or even commented on. You'd think that your character would make some comment about how he didn't like doing this, or that the game would make any effort to point out that it's not a good thing to abuse your partner, but no. Nothing. This part of the game is honestly very uncomfortable to play, and it comes off as a crass attempt to use heavy themes to make Twelve Minutes come across as more profound.

And then yeah... the game looks kinda bad, the character animations are very janky and uncanny and the top-down angle is extremely awkward and hurt my brain. Despite the Hollywood cast, a lot of the voice acting (especially of the player character) comes off as stilted, uninterested and poorly directed. And the UI is terrible; they manage to fuck up the classic point-and-click paradigm of 'combine item with item' by making it unclear what you're even clicking on half the time. And repeating a loop when you mess up leads to constant repetition of the same content; you can... sort of skip dialogue you have already heard, but the fast-forward system is implemented so sloppily, and can't be used on the long conversations between your wife and the cop that you'll have to sit through. All in all it's just... such a mess.

And yet it's presented so confidently. Twelve Minutes is convinced that it's innovative and deep, but the best that it manages to come off as is pretentious. I really don't reccommend this one if you want to play an actually good game, but as a case study of how things can go wrong in game design this is must-play material right here.

What a tremendous waste of potential, taking an interesting concept and absolutely running it to the ground with a horrible, nonsensical story and neverending tedium. I don’t even know where to start with this.

The story is bottom-tier, with its culmination (if you’ve played it you know what I mean) just being groan inducing instead of the massive revelation it’s probably meant to be. One of the few occasions where the true ending clears nothing up, instead just making the story even more nonsensical.

The gameplay is structured around making you constantly repeat actions to get to make even slight changes to some outcomes. This gets old extremely quickly. This game would have heavily benefited from a rewind/chapter select feature but then it would be extremely short, and it felt the need to pad its runtime by making the player do the most mindless shit again and again.

Animation is bizarre, sometimes it looks natural and sometimes it looks like Sims interacting with one another. It’s very jarring, especially coupled with the (numerous) sequence breaks that can very easily be performed in the game and completely destroy the ambiance of tension of a scene.

Overall it’s such a shame that this game exists in this state. Even in a time where loop games are popular and relatively prolific, this is a creative enough concept to stand out. Unfortunately, it’s pretty awful.

2/10 (both of these for the idea)