Twelve Minutes Reviews

Story has awfully creepy ending and not in a good way. Puzzle mechanics are annoying, because you need to redo the whole time loop even if you want to check/change one thing.

This game suffers from the lack of checkpoints or saves. Figuring out a story this convoluted by trial and error felt so tedious I wanted to throw up 2 hours in. Granted, there seems to be many possibilities and things to try, but considering you're timed - any little mistake can cost you a try, forcing you to start over to sit through all the steps again. Interesting concept, but makes a frustrating experience. Also, after getting what seems to be the "true" ending - I can't start a new game. It just [spoiler]returns me into the empty apartment with the broken watch[/spoiler] and I don't know what to do with it. 5/10

So I love a good time-loop game. Outer Wilds is hands-down my favorite game of all-time, and given that Annapurna released both, of course I thought I would love this game too. And there are some neat parts to this game that are interesting. But a lot of Twelve Minutes just doesn't gel for me. It falls under "games I want to like, but struggle to enjoy". I got stuck for at least two hours trying different things, dropped the game, and when I came back, still was stuck, and had to peek through a walk-through to tell me what I missed (it was not obvious, and was not hinted at, as far as I remembered). It just feels like there aren't enough options for what I should be able to do with the knowledge I have. Or like there should be more information I can glean with the knowledge I have. Or like there should be an option for hints that the MC could give for what avenue to pursue next. And it admittedly also feels quite infuriating and awkward when the wife demands "just talk to me" after you have exhausted all dialogue tree options with her for the 10th time. With Outer Wilds, I was always able to reference the information I had so far, and there was always an abundance of things I could mess with trying, even if it was just wandering around the environment, or just trying something stupid that I know should get me killed. Twelve Minutes... stagnates a little too easily.

The game presents an interesting time-loop concept, elevated by outstanding voice performances from James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. While the story has its moments, the gameplay relies too much on trial and error, which can become frustrating. The limited space and repetitive nature may not appeal to everyone, but it's a unique experience worth trying for fans of interactive storytelling.

This has to be one of the most audacious video game stories I’ve played. I left feeling kinda icky by the end and not sure if that’s good or bad lol. I really really love the format of this game and it uses the time loop trope well. If you like games that give you a good mystery to unravel you’re definitely in for a treat. I would love to see the dev make a new game building on this format.

Gameplay: https://youtu.be/kz54iw5J21k My first gameplay got corrupted unfortunately, so this is just the continuation. Amnyway, other than The Stanley Parable, this is another mind blowing gaming experience that is an emotional rollercoaster with different twists and a creative unconventional gameplay. You have 12 munites to figure out the story, so after every 12 minutes the start from he beginning and try to get other pieces of the story without sounding like a creep as humans and their emotions can be hard to deal with, especially when the truth about them is involved. It's the type of game you cannot explain without spoiling it at it has to do with a time loop which when the information of the story is revealed, also creates a ouroboros effect. The game plays on how the present is affected by the past and how the future can be either determined by knowing the truth and accepting the past, or going with the "ignorance is bliss" saying and just staying happy with what you have without having to work through any relationship hardships. It can be a hard game to complete for something named 12 Minutes as it takes way too long to figure the loops out and unravel the story, which can make it hard to progress if you do not keep track with what you've found out. It's incredible but what good is a great story you can't tell anyone? Simply because it's an ouroboros temporal paradox loop without a clear beginning or ending. Either way, I recommend this game, it's best to experience it yourself and try out different choices, trust me, you can do crazy stuff here and they all give out some piece of the puzzle.

Short, but deep and interesting. Intriguing on each step. I found myself at the end of the game after almost 7 hours of gameplay but it was a great journey! Definitely worth it. Voice acting is the top, thank you!

I have mixed feelings on this game. I feel that it had a lot of potential that it didn't reach. Interesting story and plot twists, but some things are spoon-fed to you and other things seem impossible to discover without a walk-through. Very repetitive gameplay because of the time-loop, which I'm sure is intentional, but could have been executed better. Certain times it allows you to skip dialogue, even if you haven't seen it yet, but other times there will be long cutscenes and waiting periods that you can't skip. There are so many options and yet so many will just end the same way. I feel there could have been so much more to this game.

This was the first game I've ever played, out of well over a hundred, that really made me feel like I wasted my time and money. It has a pretty interesting premise, and it does start you out with a good amount of options, but the more I played the more of them simply turned into dead ends, until, in the last 2-3 hours of the game, I was essentially being railroaded into a single path with little indication of what to do next at each step. No hints, no guidance, nothing. The game really doesn't give you freedom to resolve things in any way other than the singular route the devs intended. Towards the end of the game, you have to do some really unintuitive things to complete the game that eventually led me to just using a guide, and I wasn't left with any more motivation to get the rest of the endings I had missed. I can see the appeal to some extent with how great the voice acting was and how fun the first few hours of discovery felt, but I'm sorry to say that the slogfest that was the final two to three hours just broke any and all interest I had in recommmending this to others.

This game is repetitive by design, but that design might have intrinsically been a bad choice. At least without a UI that allowed skipping parts that are replayed ad nauseam. The voice acting is great enough to almost pull the sophomoric plot into the recommendation zone, but then alternate endings that detracted more than they added brought it back down. Still, kudos to McAvoy, Ridley, and Dafoe for bringing their normal high standards to this project.