Thoughts on Twelve Minutes?

I put in about 2 hours so far and have avoided seeing people play or talk about the game to go in blind. Curious about what other people have thought about the game.

So far, I think the game is................Eh. This is partially minor stuff, but it also seemed to mess up some of my loops. The game has been a little janky, with some of the animation, people clipping through walls, and so on. One time the husband seemingly stood up on their own, which triggered a fail state by accident. I think the controls are a little odd, in terms of selecting and interacting with objects. Both of those together make the game have this fumbling feeling.

Those points aside, I've found the time loop aspect to be underwhelming so far.

All told, it's just been an alright experience so far.

It's... good okay (after some more thought). I got what seems to be the final ending (I'll give people a day or two of poking around to see if there's anything super obscure). My playthrough didn't take super long, only about 3 hours. I'm mildly curious about some what-if scenarios I didn't really explore, but unsure if I'll jump back into it again to play them through. Reminded me a lot of The Stanley Parable in testing branching storylines to see where they lead.

If they let me queue actions like The Sims I think it would have gone a long way to feeling just a tad nicer to play through, considering some of the setups you need to do to push one step forward, but overall that's a minor nitpick. I definitely felt some of that jank though, especially when having to maneuver around other people in those small spaces.

Will be interested to see how people respond to it. I feel this could be a pretty divisive game, I think I enjoyed it overall but I think some aspects of the story weren't handled very well.

EDIT: My opinion has soured as time passes and I reflect on it. Not only is the gameplay not as interactive as something like this should probably be, considering the small scope of the apartment, but the narrative has more than just a few aspects that aren't well handled -- I think it's just straight up bad. What a bummer, I was looking forward to this.

For a timeloop game it feels rather clumsy.

I don't know much about the developer but it really seems like their either have never made a game before or haven't played one in about 20 years - or both. Some design decisions feel very odd and counter-intuitive to the whole loop scenario. For instance not being able to simply fast forward to diverging story points is in this case a huge hindrance. In order to sus out some key information I had to set the dinner table multiple times in order to trigger several other events - after a while it gets to be a pain.

Another thing that would be really helpful is the ol' "highlight interactable objects" toggle. It took me a long time to find the knife, even though it's not really hidden, because it just blends into the environment - and I'm playing on a monitor too. There is an item hidden in plain sight which this would kind of ruin but I honestly feel in that particular case the game is kind of cheating unless you do some pixel hunting or stumble onto it by pure accident. Even when I knew what to look for I still had to laboriously mouse over the entire area to find it.

The big-name actors seem wasted. They hired three very recognizable screen actors and then they told two of them to enact extremely plain American accents - why hire non-Americans in the first place? Maybe Annapurna had them on the lot for a day and said "hey maybe we can get them to record some lines and the game will get a bit more attention that way?" James McAvoy has such a unique voice it's just a shame he has to play "American man" in this. To his credit he is, at least to me, completely unrecognizable. Willem Dafoe is great though.

Apart from that there are as mentioned above some rough edges. For a game set in such a limited location the minimalistic graphic style seems like the wrong choice. The animations are very stilted as the characters stop and pivot to enact "kiss animation #2" and then swivel away to sit down. Some items clip through hands, so on and so forth.

It's definitely interesting but a lot of things start to get in the way of wanting to go through with solving the puzzle. While a game like Her Story used it's minimalistic setting quite effectively, I feel like Twelve Minutes takes an interesting premise and really fails to capture the full potential of all this scenario could entail. Fortunately it's another Game Pass joint so I can't get too mad about it but I did expect more.

Going to avoid spoilers and just strongly encourage people on the fence to skip this game.

The worst. Like, actually the worst video game I've ever seen (at least as far as actual games and not some bitcoin scam or whatever... and even then). The gameplay looked completely unappealing, so I watched the IGN all loop complete walkthrough and just can't understand how this came out. I won't go on an extended negative rant on it, but the story is nonsense. I love a good time story and can suspend disbelief but the story doesn't even try to play within its simple rule set. In one loop a character knows information that they explicitly say they didn't know about in a previous loop. Some of the crucial plot dialogues are so wildly unnatural (a certain phone call) and many scenes follow that old school adventure game logic that might be cute in a game like monkey island but is really bizarre here. I get making games is hard but if this is the result just don't do it.

So far I've played about 90 minutes and my reaction is mixed. The vocal performances are great (if not particularly standout) but the writing itself feels pretty clunky. Figuring out what to do in each loop feels fairly frustrating in large part due to the clunkiness of that writing, especially because it seems like you just can't say things that would seemingly be very natural things to say in certain conversations.

Also wish that they had spent time on making the animations more fluid and seamless instead of changing the graphical style. As it stands the characters all move in a very Sim-like fashion which feels like wasted potential for a game of this scope and the drama that it wants to capture.

One thing that stood out to me was that I think the game could really have benefited from a more restricted 'first run' where they restrict your freedom of action until you at least see a basic outline of the events of the night. I understand why they don't since it gives you control immediately but as it stands, my first loop ended with me not even finding out about the pregnancy or murder (extremely early spoiler) because I was just kind of clicking everywhere like a doofus. It's ultimately a small thing but it if was different I think my first impression would be at least a little better.

I'll probably keep playing until I reach an ending but parts of it are definitely feeling like a rough draft of a great concept, especially given how long we've known about this game's existence.

Edit: Having now finished it, my feelings pretty much remain the same, though I've soured a bit more having been exposed to more of the clumsy writing. Without spoiling too much, the plot twist is completely bizarre and besides coming out of nowhere, really confused me as to what they wanted to do with the story. It results in an ending that leaves basically everything unresolved and, unless I'm missing something, doesn't actually make sense within the timeline?

Just finished it and overall really enjoyed the experience.
I do wish it leaned more heavily into the archetypical Groundhog Day perfectionism aspect of adding layer upon layer of additional information to subsequent loops. Sadly, after a while, the protagonist just stops adjusting his methods altogether. You kinda just reach sort of a "final act" and are basically left with a character sitting at an adventure game's equivalent of max. level.
Depending on how many times you went through it all, that can become really repetitive and even frustrating, since no real person would just brute force his way through a scenario like that, eventually just refusing to refine their approach. It's a small video game, though, taking place in a tiny, 12-minute window, and there's only so many lines written ... it ought to be like that, I guess. Still, as decent as their performances are, I can't shake the feeling that there'd be a hell of a lot more variations and intricacies to the loops had the developer used more easily accessible voice actors.
Still, at points I loved uncovering this mystery. I can overlook the game's shortcomings. 4/5 from me and a big recommendation.

This game feels like it needed more - I don't want to say time, because it's already taken years - but concepting, maybe? I think there's a neat idea in here somewhere, but nothing about the gameplay really works well together. It already suffers from the adventure game problem of "I'm stuck and I don't know what to do," but then unfortunately marries that to the platformer/Souls problem of "I died and now need to repeat a tedious chunk of the level to try again."

Maybe if the clock only advanced when you took an action rather than constantly moving? Or give the player some ability to program a predetermined set of actions and then skip to that point? I dunno, but it needed to do something different.

It might not be such a huge issue if the act of playing were slightly more enjoyable, but everything is so stiff. The character animations are wooden and the conversations are stilted, so it just isn't that fun to repeat things over and over again.

Also - the plot twist is stupid. Like, really stupid. It isn't so much out-of-left-field as it is "a mysterious object from another galaxy that spent the last 200 years orbiting Pluto before it was pulled toward Earth in a syzygy and landed in your backyard."

maaan, i'm watching this thread with a close eye because i'm pretty torn-

-i kinda want to dive in to assess all the tonal 'darkness' i've heard described over various reviews and podcasts. people are talking up the subject matter of this game the same way i heard people describe TLOU2- not in terms of wanton violence or misery, but rather some people walking away from it saying 'this was dark, and i don't know how i feel about it.' i ended up really, really enjoying TLOU2 (not due to the darkness but i thought it was wholly tolerable) so this game has me similarly intrigued. i also really enjoyed playing Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice last year so i'm down for heavy.

-everything else i'm hearing is this thing is rough. very much a 'gamepass game' (which i don't sub to) so i'm a little hesitant.

how long is it taking people to reach what they think is the 'true' ending?

@mellotronrules: Haven't played myself but it seems like most people fall around 4 hours from what I hear.

I've spent probably two or three hours on this game so far, and I don't think I've made any progress so far. I have no idea what I'm suppose to do. The only progress I've made so far was due to glancing through forum posts, where I discovered I was hiding in the wrong room, I guess. I found the thing. No idea what I'm suppose to do with it. Maybe I'm just dumb, but I'm not having much fun trying to trial and error this thing out.

@mellotronrules: Just checked and my play time clocked in at just over 3 hours to see credits.

the trial and error is putting me off. between watching the QL and the Nextlander video I am already dreading having to try out stuff ad infinitum. i feel shitty saying this, but if it had the production polish of a Quantic Dream game I might be down for it. But this feels too claustrophobic for me.

@humanity: I had a similar problem with not being able to see stuff.

I spent a time loop to try figure something out - I hid in the closet so I could see if the wife would give up where the watch actually was, and she does. But then I couldn't ask her any more about the watch and when I went to check the medicine cabinet I couldn't see the vent at all on my screen and had to go near enough the very bottom of the "darkness" to see anything.

As some others have said, there's a real clunkiness to it as well. Like clicking on the cop and your character just saying "sir.. sir.. sir" until he one shots you is really dumb.

Also your characters intonation in how he delivers the lines changes so inconsistently between choice to choice that it's very strange and makes it seem like I've skipped parts.

I really liked it! I want to dive in and discover the secrets but it does get repetitive. I'm surprised so many people don't like it. Though I can understand why the endgame can be pretty divisive, I would describe the twist as very m.night shyamalan

@evilestraptor: There were some sequences that didn't seem all that logical to me but after a while you just don't have enough items so you start clicking everything on everything - the problem is that to test if a thing will do something you often have to go through a tedious setup. Like questioning the cop is a pain to get together. An example of something I didn't think made all that much sense showing the baby clothes to the cop for him to remember that Dahlia is the name of the nanny.

I just finished and the twist and endings might be the worst endings I've ever seen in a video game.

Ummmm, guys, I think I'm

Might still be a spoiler for you too, care.

@tartyron: beat me to it by 17 minutes.

I literally came here just to say its just a shitty Oldboy ripoff with less going on and bad gameplay. The final "puzzle" of *stare at the watch* was so random and disconnected that I spent hours before checking a guide and I'm glad I did because I never would have just guessed that the answer was to look at some dumb animation.

@jesus_phish:

not that I'm defending it, but that particular thing being hard to see is intentional. There is a way to be told to look there, and they want you to see that scene and be told to look not just find it on your own. They know adventure game people are going to click around checking everything and you can skip half the games dialogue by doing that early.

I don't know how people are beating this in 3 hours because it took me about 8. I guess they happened upon the correct combinations quicker than me. A lot of stumbling through interactions for me.

The base concept of a time loop in a single room is interesting, but holy hell...this game sucks.

Aside from the tedium of having to go through the motions over and over to progress the story just a little bit farther (there really should've been a better way to skip ahead), the story and twist are just awful. This twist is certainly shocking, but the execution here is way too clumsy to work in the way that similar stories like Oldboy pulled it off. I mean come on...he forgot!!?? You justify the time loop and shocking revelation with some sort of mindfulness/brainwashing nonsense. Really?!

@eccentrix: It took me around 3.5 hours, but there are definitely some spots where someone could get stuck. Also, even if you kinda know what you need to do, it can still be difficult to sort out mechanically what exactly you need to do to get there.

It reminds me of sims in the best way. I like the idea of this game in theory but execution left a lot to be desired. It’s full of awkward jittery jank as the characters try and figure out how they should interact with each other which shows signs of something truly cool but just wasn’t as fun to deal with as I’d hoped. Getting stuck in a time loop because I didn’t do something in time or forgot to say something before I did something left me very frustrated. I would constantly have to start over because as I was learning the solution to the puzzle, I would realize I forgot to ask my wife something and then I’d be stuck and have to reset the loop. I guess that’s more on me than the game but the game did intentionally leave the UI very simple when it could have easily added a journal for you to check back with what you know or write down order of events to help you keep track of things. With that being said, I love the attention to detail in this game. For the most part, if you can think it, you can (within reason) do it. There’s tons of potential for this game and I’d love to see what they do with it in the futur. We’ve seen what they can do i the confines of one apartment, what about a couple of apartments? One last nitpick I had was with the writing. I understand they were trying to do a lot with a little but some of those lines were cheesy as hell. Specifically William Dafoe’s characters first line. Like, what? Overall, a great game pass title but I feel like I would have been a little frustrated if I had paid 20 or more for this.

Absolutely. It's the movie you'd watch on cable or Netflix for a lark, but would've been pissed if you'd paid to see it in a movie theater.

@eccentrix: I used a guide by loop ten. I think that is likely how these 3 hour play throughs are happe ring, and I did it because I got to the point were I just got frustrated with the repetition. My total loops was maybe about 15 if you don’t count the ones that I just purposely just ended the loop by…ways and means.

I think my final spoiler free opinion is that I like time loop puzzle boxes in general, but this games interface issues such as not being able to speed time at will (it is there but only in specific spots that aren’t always available depending on what your trying to do on each loop) and only being able to skip lines that still take time, instead of skipping full conversations you’ve already heard 20 times. There are shortcuts, but not fast enough when you just have one little experiment to try and still have to just sit there a few minutes doing nothing. And the narrative just not being something I found shocking or mind blowing like they clearly thought it would be. It was a great idea with some great execution, the first time you do it, but the repetition kills the gravity and too often doesn’t result in an intriguing new bit, but rather just what you saw coming anyway or what you already saw 12 times.

It might have a better reaction by me if it just actually was a 2 hour game instead of forcing twice the time commitment just clicking through dialogue I already heard.

@tartyron: 15 sounds pretty low really! I’m guessing I had around 50 or more of real loops and then a ton of those “oops forgot to say THIS so now she won’t say THAT” might as well start over.. let’s fill these glasses.

Also WATER? Who drinks tap water with dessert?

Almost like some form of PTSD talking about Twelve Minutes I’m getting flashbacks to Gods Will Be Watching, which was another game I had high hopes for that looked and sounded great and then the gameplay turned out so obnoxiously tedious.

@eccentrix: The big one that most people seem to struggle on involving how to knock out the cop I just kind of stumbled upon. That was the big time sink puzzle, the rest I didn't have much issue with.

I feel like I'm gonna be in the minority opinion by saying this, but here goes:

I really liked the loop-based, puzzle box gameplay where the goal is hunting down information and figuring out how to unlock the next bit of narrative. It had a ton of plates spinning in the air and with how reactive the characters and environment are to your actions, it's super impressive. I also understand that I may have had a breezier time through all the puzzles because I hyperfixated on one thread at a time, which isn't everyone's playstyle. If there is one thing the game excels at, it's giving you that "Aha!" moment, because I felt like the smartest guy in the world when I thought up a solution and it got executed exactly as I planned.

All that being said:

Oh man did the twist ending really drop the ball and sour the rest of the game. It's one of the few times I said "Oh no." out loud while playing a game and the final sequence really deflated by enthusiasm for it.

This is probably the biggest let-down I can think of in recent memory, even after being up on it in the beginning and middle parts. Hey that first 9/10ths? Really solid! Too bad that final tenth undid everything it had going for it.

@colonelsanders21 said:

I got that pretty quickly, then I spent up to an hour doing that over and over again trying to figure out how to get him to talk once he was tied up.

There was one part near the end where the cop says something like "Okay, forget about all the murder stuff for a minute, I came here for the watch." The protagonist says "Oh, I don't have it on me, let me go get it," to which the cop replies "I'm not falling for that" and knocks him out. So I had to loop through the whole thing again, except picking up the watch this time. That made me kind of legitimately angry.

I had something very similar with the polaroid. I had picked it up to show him but then when the wife insisted he go to the fridge to look at it I went "oh goddammit" and redid that whole thing over again.

@dareitus: No I get that it's meant to be hidden, but it's so hidden and I found I had to mouse over it just so to trigger it. This was after I found out about it from dialogue, but until I actually got it out of there I couldn't even confront the wife about it.

@chaser324 So if you intend to keep playing to figure it out don't read this. But if you want to understand more and you're done with the game - I will just say that this stuff just makes me dislike the game even more than I did initially with the bad twist.

@eccentrix: At one point I knocked the wife out with sleeping pills, put the watch on the table, took away the food and the spoons, left the big light on, closed all the doors and hid in the closet thinking "Oh he'll maybe just take the watch, lets just see". He completely ignores the watch and goes through the same motions as if it wasn't right there and goes into the bedroom anyway. Another time I handed her the picture so she could have it to show him that she couldn't have killed the father. She never gets to try to show him. If it's not on the fridge it's a fail state. Even though there is dialogue to suggest to hand it to her.

@colonelsanders21: This happened to me and it was infuriating that both of them brushed off my attempts to show it to him. The little things like that added up over the course of playtime to really undercut any of the drama.

@jesus_phish: I did both of those things too. I actually never successfully did it from the fridge, I went about it a different way. This is definitely an adventure game that will only accept certain solutions, even when more obvious solutions are available.

@jesus_phish: You know I feel pretty bad because somehow I never really connected the dots that way even though in retrospect it’s obvious that’s what the big twist is. I think at some point I was so tired of the mechanics that when I got to the reveal I just thought it was nonsensical time stuff and not, you know, like a metaphor. So thanks for spelling it out cause man I had some mental block going there.

Also in my defense I got to the ending that sort of prevents you playing anymore and even though the game specifically warns you several times that it’s the point of no return I was a second too late in choosing a dialog option to prevent it. This led to subtitles playing out one scenario and the game video and audio continuing in the point of no return route. I wanted to try a few more things and I quickly alt-tabbed and did End Process in the middle of that big emotional climax but that didn’t work so not only did I lose all my progress but I also didn’t get to properly experience that ending either.

Funny enough it didn’t take THAT long to get enough info so I could get the “Perfect Day” ending I wanted starting from scratch. That ending by the way is pretty unsettling once you know the twist.

The game needed a lot more polish. There are aspects of it like the animation, fast forwarding mechanics, and the way certain scenarios play out that feel straight up unfinished. It kinda rubs me the wrong way that they presumably spent a lot of money getting big name actors involved when the game itself often feels like it's breaking apart at the seams, even though there isn't THAT much going on.

@humanity: You spend hours playing the rest of the game and then that reveal is maybe like, 30 seconds to a minute long and it's not explained well at all in my opinion. I wouldn't feel bad about it, I think it's terribly explained. You also have to get I think at least two or three specific endings to be able to put it altogether, and even then they don't do much to try guide you to "this is what's happening".

I played it last night and didn't particularly care for it, largely do to the reasons others mentioned here.

I think the major problem it has is it's just the wrong way to do a time loop game. Making you go through the EXACT SAME MOTIONS and dialogue over and over and over again is just not the right choice, thematic integrity be damned, and the skip isn't robust enough. By the closing of the story, tedium had undercut the vast majority of what little drama that ridiculous, trite, cliché "revelation" provided.

Seriously, though, that little twist thing near the end is so bad it defeats the rest of the game. I audibly groaned as it unfolded on my television screen.

We've got the typical classic adventure game problems, only this time substituting moon logic for ridiculous specificity but the outcome is the same: Things that should work or change things don't, simply because that's not the one way the story was meant to unfold.

I could probably say the character models look a little bad, and that McAvoy and Ridley are completely wasted on the cardboard American accent, but those are less egregious things to me. I also had to fight the controls a little bit, but I was playing on console, so.... yeah. Hey, at least Dafoe turns in a worthy performance.

In all, I'm really happy I played this through Game Pass. I think it's a collection of interesting concepts that probably weren't cooked all the way for the experience.

@jesus_phish: That does make sense. Those specifics didn't really come across to me that way, but frankly, I think it's still a pretty poorly executed narrative even with that context.

I 100% agree with you.

Now I don't want to be a negative farty-pants poo-poo dog,
but this game feels like it was left in the oven for too long and yet somehow
ended up flawed and bland. Not much to munch on in my bowl.
But hey, it's an ok Gamepass game! .. woof.

If you liked Outer Wilds and this for it's timeloop puzzling, go back to Sexy Brutale. It's definitly a better experience than this is and has a story that actually hits.

I haven’t played the game, but it’s disappointing to see so many people think that 12 Minutes is an interesting idea with flawed execution. Was really looking forward to this one.

The reaction to 12 Minutes reminds me of my reaction to Spy Party, where the scope of the game is such a small space with a fairly low amount of moving characters that you’d think *surely* they could polish all the animations and scripting and UI to absolutely shine, but a bunch of things with the feel and look of the game are still clunky and janky despite many years of development.

I was curious about this but also planning to it a miss. But heard Vinny mention on Nextlander that it was very much a point and click* adventure game, and that was enough to tip me over the edge into buying it. I play a lot of adventure games and I thought this would help me tolerate any bullshit and find the gem of the game beneath.

This was a terrible mistake, (Not Vinny's fault, he gave fair commentary.) It starts off a bit clumsy but sets up a promising hook for a story. But it rapidly becomes more cumbersome and less interesting after only a handful of times through it.

I'm about an hour in so far, have done maybe 5 or 6 loops. And it only took about 4 runs to find a potential solution that didn't work because something obvious is uninteractable, (I wanted to hide in the dark bedroom and electrocute the cop when he tried to turn on the light, but the window curtains just can't be clicked on for some reason, so you can't get the room dark enough)

I've also already fucked at least 2 runs because I didn't notice the invisible transition from "clicking in the middle of the room will fast forward through the scripted cutscene you've seen before" to "clicking in the middle of the room will do something that will commence the incredibly slow and unskippable/un-fast'forwardable cutscene that ultimately leads to failure"

I still have a flicker of interest, but I kind of can't be fucked continuing with it.

*Unrelated to the quality of the game: But this fact also fueled my private conspiracy theory that the game is ripping off the similarly titled AGS game "Abducted: 10 Minutes" from 2004. Which has a different setting, but similar premise of looping through a short point and click adventure until you get it right.

@magnetphonics: There is a way to do what you're trying with the switch but it requires a different approach and hiding location

@evilestraptor: I'm having the same experience, there was no, "huh i guess ill mash stuff together and see what happens, I'm stuck" moments for me. I had a good flow of learning more and seeing what i could try to do, it really wasn't that hard. i enjoyed my short time with it, nothing major to write home about though.

I've come full circle on the game, I think.

Played and enjoyed until you figure out what thread to pull on to keep unraveling the story (which required WAY too much repetition). Then the ending uh... revelations... made me hate it. Then I read some fan theories and thought it was maybe OK. Then I thought harder about it and re-hated it because it was dumb.

But today? I am recommending my wife play it because I want to see her reaction to the dumb part. I can't help but wonder if it was partially designed as streamer bait just for that.