The store page farts on about how this has "the best parts of bioshock and bioshock infinite": no it fucking doesn't. It's cool to revisit rapture (my beloved) but it's missing the atmosphere and claustrophobic level design that made the original location so enchanting. The combat tries to bring in the survival horror elements of bioshock but trying to hamfist those into Infinite's action heavy style just makes everything worse. Fighting a big daddy without all of the immersive sim elements just feels wrong; fighting anyone else is just annoying.

That plot twist is stupid as shit too.

The biggest problem with Dorfromantik is the lack of progression, after 2 or so hours you've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer, but that simplicity also works in the game's favour. It's very easy to spend an hour or so slowly building up your little piece of countryside, erecting vast forests and idyllic river-side towns, with a giant railway network that goes nowhere and serves no purpose off to the side. The game has a very natural way of encouraging you to make things look as pretty as possible, and even if it deals you a 10 card set of 3-way railway tracks in a row, the visual style still manages to make it look sufficiently pleasant regardless. If anything, the restrictive nature of the game's building system encourages you to be as creative as possible with your approach, which often leads to stuff that's even prettier than what my ape brain could have come up with.

So much better on a second play-through (at least for me). Wonderfully immersive when you know what you're doing and you're not stopping and starting every 20 seconds for a puzzle. Such a beautifully constructed world, with so many tiny little details that really sell the realism of the place you're walking through. The sound design is gorgeous, especially for the underwater stuff (some of the best water levels in any game right here) and the animation work for... that thing is exceptionally good, I have no clue how they even pulled it off.

I kinda resent this exact genre (don't know why I keep playing them honestly). They're not even really games, they're movies with little mini-games sprinkled in, and even then, the mini-games are barely even games, they're on the same level as those sliding ball things that kids play with in a waiting room. It's such a glorified waste of the medium, if you're going to make a game, make a game; if you want to make something that's story heavy, use game mechanics to help tell that story (or just make a fucking movie). Don't hand me a pixar short film and then "enhance" it with the very gripping 'clear the screen for the 10th time' mini-game.

Probably the most disappointing game I've played since The Witness. Absolutely adore the concept, the story and the use of imagery (the use of the clock is fucking stellar) but the gameplay is so painfully dull that I was left bored and uninterested only an hour in.

And I don't think it's necessarily a puzzle design problem, there's a bunch of clever puzzles in here, it's just that the game design (more specifically the execution of the loop mechanic) practically disincentivises experimentation. No one wants to slog through the same dialogue over and over again just to try a different approach that MIGHT give some new information, but that is exactly what Twelve MInutes forces you to do. Again. And Again. And Again.

I gave up 2 hours in and looked up a guide. Puzzle games are never fun when you follow guides religiously but this game somehow managed to be more fun when I was tabbing out every 3 seconds to look at Polygon, which is a fucking achievement.