Even when I did feel clever solving something, that satisfaction was dulled by repeating the solution.Īfter 12 Minutes glitched and deleted my save, I opened up the game folder on my SSD and found a log file that contained a list of every action I'd taken and the bit of game code that corresponded to it. I reached almost every solution by doing slightly different permutations of the same few actions, but with little of the creative reasoning or observation that better mystery games like Return of the Obra Dinn thrive on. I appreciated that I could move some stuff around the apartment even when it was pointless, and that I could flush things down the toilet just for the hell of it.ġ2 Minutes is an ambitious game for a small development team, but it ends up constrained by its main idea. There are things I did love in 12 Minutes, like the art style and the top-down perspective, which lets you project a lot of feeling into the characters without seeing their faces. These are little things, but in a game that's mostly dialogue and characters having big emotional moments, abrupt tonal shifts and awkward animations break the mood.
There's very little reactivity in the dialogue, so you can try to convince your wife you're in a time loop, making yourself look like a full-blown lunatic, and then say nevermind-let's have some dessert! I noticed some other lines of dialogue also assumed I'd said something in that loop that I actually hadn't. But there were many other moments where 12 Minutes just came off as awkward-in one moment James McAvoy begging for his life, heart in throat, the next a goofy canned "Sir?" when I try to talk to the cop when he isn't interactable. I had one other crash and a few cases of the cop's pathing getting stuck, leaving him awkwardly walking in place after handcuffing my character on the floor. That wasn't the only glitch I ran into during 12 Minutes, though it was the only really significant one. But 12 Minutes also denied me that satisfaction by glitching out during the ending, turning my screen black while the audio played on when I quit and reloaded it, my save file had disappeared. Whatever the reason, the end result is a game that wants to be emotionally impactful but never gave me anything to latch onto, and the conclusion was so contrived I was ready to Alt+F4 and uninstall the game in a huff.
Perhaps the developers wrote heaps more dialogue and ended up cutting 12 Minutes to the bone to keep it from being too confusing for players or too expensive to produce. The voice performances are genuinely great when the actors deliver their weightier lines, too and I found Willem Dafoe genuinely menacing from beginning to end. It never offers the opportunity to ask questions like "what did you do today" or "how's our marriage going?" or "honey, what's your name?"Įach repeated loop was a missed opportunity to throw in some new dialogue or internal monologue from my character-the kinds of little details we've seen work so effectively in indie developer Supergiant's games like Hades and Bastion.
We learn about these characters' deep, dark secrets, but we basically don't get to spend any time with them in the present-even though time is the one thing that 12 Minutes has in abundance. Even when adventure game puzzles annoy me, I know there are some jokes and new places to explore as a reward for getting past them.ĭespite casting big name actors Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy, 12 Minutes seems weirdly uninterested in fleshing out these characters beyond the bare minimum needed for its plot. 12 Minutes is especially frustrating because it has nothing else going on outside its time loop mystery.
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