12 Minutes

[Leisher]

You are a guy returning home from work to the apartment you share with your girlfriend. 12 minutes after you walk in the door, time loops and you return to the point where you had just entered. You cannot leave or the 12 minutes restart. If you die, the 12 minutes restarts. If you do not resolve the issues at hand to get an ending, the 12 minutes reset.

Featuring the voices of James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe.

The design of the game is very well done. The loops are short, which is important or it would get crazy repetitive. You'll have an idea of what needs to happen and you have to use trial and error to advance your options each time through. The devs even clearly give you shortcuts once you start opening things up.

The issues you are dealing with in the 12 minutes involve a cop who comes around 5-6 minutes in and your wife potentially having a secret. The story is really interesting and develops very well, until...The very predictable and monumentally stupid twist that they had to add.

Not every story needs a twist and a poorly thought out twist ruins an otherwise good story. That's exactly what happened here. The twist completely breaks the rest of the story in every conceivable way. It makes zero sense and isn't explained. It is done just for shock value. It is as mindbogglingly stupid and illogical as the ending to Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. It genuinely ruined the game for me.

I know the two guys who wrote this have talent, but I think they fell victim to trying to do too much. They had a great concept, great voice actors, and figured they needed to "wow" with the story.

FYI, there are multiple endings and each is an achievement. 12 total achievements, but I'm not sure there are 12 total endings?

If you find it for less than $5 and like puzzle games with a narrative, everything else is awesome. Just be warned that the narrative crumbles at the end.


If you'll never play it and you're curious:

The GF's dad is murdered. She thought she did it. (She DID shoot him, which is weirdly forgiven without explanation.) The cop also thought she did it and was there when the dad bled out. However, the dad was having an affair with the nanny and had a secret child, a son. The GF called this son "monster" all the time, but clearly does not remember, literally, anything else about him. She also did not know he was her half brother. Anyway, turns out the nanny whose name the cop and GF could not remember is the same name as what the GF plans to name her future baby (she's preggers). The cop's there to get a watch to sell so he can pay for his daughter's cancer treatment AND get revenge on the GF for murdering his close friend, her dad. Meanwhile, you are obviously the half brother. Your GF that you knocked up is your half sister. This would be fine IF you had this knowledge, but your character remembers NOTHING. He doesn't remember his mother's name, being in love with the GF since they were kids, getting into a scuffle with her father and killing him, or his own mother's name. There's a hilarious moment when he figures it out and breaks down screaming how did I forget that? Yeah, you wouldn't. You fucking couldn't.