12 Minute Review

A powerful ode to a classic adventure game with plots comparable to a limited TV series, 12 minutes This is a thrilling service. However, it has some drawbacks that are so common that it can be considered a genre metaphor.

Twelve Minutes is not a game that requires a particularly complicated explanation of its design. A story adventure game told from a top-down perspective. You play as a husband going home to find two shocking things: a man who claims to be a policeman knocking on the door saying that your wife wants to murder, And the second is the fact that you are in a time loop. The time is reset every 12 minutes the moment you enter the apartment. The same thing happens if you somehow die or get seriously injured.

It’s an interesting premise that leads to some thoughtful and thrilling game design concepts. 12 minutes is a game about information. Knowledge is power. Being trapped in a time loop, you can use each loop to learn a little more about the situation at hand so that you can proceed better in your next run.

So the game runs in a 12-minute loop, almost completely in three small rooms, but it takes hours to complete the complete experience. I’ve seen several different “endings”, but the play clock is over 10 hours.

The loop structure may make you want to do something shocking. You’re obviously on your wife’s side, but what if she has something in her that might be a clue? Well, you can get her to take medicine, stab her and kill her, search her body, and reset the loop. Very late in the experience, I discovered a new brutal way to reset the loop. As the protagonist learns from past experiences, he notices that the way the action is performed changes.

This can be conceptually nice but scary. A character doing terrible, unthinkable things knows that it doesn’t really matter in the end. The slate is always wiped clean, but he always remembers the horror he committed. You experience this character starting to unravel, and you feel it somewhat on your own.

The mystery progresses using simple adventure game metaphors and mechanics. You can point, click, and drag to manipulate objects to pick up, explore, and use items of human or environmental elements.

Using a knife on a person has a clear effect. Using sleeping pills on a mug means that when someone drinks from the mug, they spit out. Drawers can be passed through. If you know the phone number, you can use the phone. Of course, the immediate idea is to call the police. And of course, you can talk to people-cross-examine your wife and police for information available in the next loop to prove that a time reset is happening or to seek further revelation. To do.

It’s all pretty clever, and the most fun part of the game, from chat to reviews to other media, is that there are clearly multiple paths to much of the important information throughout the story. You work your own way through the problem depending on your own internal logic, and it may lead to the same results as the others, but you can reach each storybeat in a very different way can. By the way, that’s why this isn’t a game you need to follow a guide-if you get stuck, look for tips instead of instructions. This will help guide you towards a unique solution that exactly matches what you have done. far.

Twelve minutes of struggle is a typical adventure game practice. Sometimes the solution the game is looking for doesn’t match whatever the logic is. Despite the answers, they ran a few times just because the answers to the current mystery were not presented in the right moment or way. It’s frustrating. It’s the kind that’s always prevalent in this genre, from struggling to find a statement against it in Ace Attorney to the more organic situation presented here-but it’s a bit depressed. It may be. Unlike me, who plays the pre-release, at least when the game is over, I’ll be able to google for some tips.

Similarly, the test is the loop itself. Part of the nature of the game is to watch the same scene over and over, but fast-forward dialog skips have limited usefulness and having to watch the same scene over and over again can be annoying. .. I got stuck at some stage, but I knew that the time when I had to make some different decisions would come about 7-8 minutes after the loop. But I couldn’t skip at that moment because I had to tee up things so that the scene would play in a particular way. I was stuck experimenting, so I set the scene about 10 times, repeated the same actions, and listened to many of the same conversations all the time. I was able to do one of a few limited “fast travel” moments to skip the moment the cop arrived on the way, but the repetition was still pretty cruel.

I get the impression that this is at least partly a conscious choice on the part of the developer. The point of the game is to immerse yourself in these moments through repetition, and some of the hero’s frustration permeates you as you are both forced to step on the old ground again. However, on the other hand, I quit the game several times because I was tired of repeating myself. This is not ideal.

Part of this problem has been resolved, at least thanks to solid performance. Hollywood stars James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe participated in 12 Minutes, all performing powerfully. These are more nuanced characters than you think at first-although some of the features are as subtle as a hammer. Many of the games are in Kubrickesque, or Hitchcockian style, but probably not so many characters.

Ultimately, 12 Minutes offers a fascinating and thrilling experience that feels worth more than admission. It has something interesting to say through its looping core conceit, and it will make fun of your brain more than a few times-sometimes genuine, sometimes through slightly cheaper requirements to progress. I also admit that I wasn’t a fan of where the story goes at a later stage-but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t crazy about it. After all, a journey is more important than a destination-and this is a fascinating journey.