| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Xbox One | 6.90 |
| Overall | 6.90 |
|
12 Minutes is a simple point and click adventure game where your character is stuck in a 10 minute time loop and takes place entirely inside a small apartment. What was supposed to be a nice momentous evening with your wife turns to horror as a man breaks into your home and eventually kills you. Once dead, or if you attempt to escape, time resets and you start the ten minutes over again. I generally enjoy time loops, my favorite game is a time loop game. The premise intrigued me but I didn't know exactly how it would be handled, in my mind I expected some type of game where you try many different ways to escape or kill the intruder. Thats not what this game is at all. At it's heart this is a mystery game, your job is to solve the mystery of why this person is attacking you and your wife. Piece by piece you start to piece together what the man's motives are and how it relates to your wife's past, thats just the beginning. The rabbit hole goes so so so deep that by the end I was in a daze, the story is nuts, I think in a good way but for some I saw they think it jumps the shark. Either way the point is, does this game keep you engaged, and for me that was a resounding yes. At the start a few gamey issues were bugging me. In what should be a dramatic conversation my character would bumb into the wife in wierd ways, animations were stiff, there are some clipping issues. Because conversations are partly on a timer and free flowing the game can end up with weird transitions that don't feel natural at all. There were moments where you can click on the man or wife during a really dramatic moment and your character will repeat a phrase over and over like "sir?" "Sir?!" "sir", it reminded me of the infamous "JASON!" from Heavy Rain. The more I played I felt these were the consessions the devs had to make just to get this complex system of interactions to work. Maybe it could have been handled better but it's something that stopped being an issue, its more a polish thing. I think the area that will make or break this game for many is how well you can handle repetition, cause holy shit is there a lot of it. As you uncover the mystery new dialogue options will appear but for the most part you have to always start by saying the same things over and over. Thankfully you can speed up the dialogue but even then its still kind of slow. If you want to try any new variable you have to recreate all the interactions you did once again just to reach that moment where you can try something different. And when that new variable doesnt work you have to get to the next loop and start all over again. There were a few moments where I was stuck and the repetition was really getting to me, I pushed through and when I discovered the path forward it felt great but I wish there was a more interesting way to do this. 12 Minutes gives you freedom but there is only one real path forward. There are "side endings" you can get by trying different things, like say help the man, or hide while your wife is murdered. I enjoyed seeing how far I could take the different variables but ultimately discovered it doesn't really go that deep. The focus is the mystery and the drama, how much that intrigues the player is basically how much the player will enjoy the game, I felt it was well done and a story worth experiencing. One of the main draws of 12 Minutes is the movie level voice cast of James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and the great Willem Dafoe. Honestly if you substitued McAvoy and Ridley for random voice actors I would have never known the difference, they don't even sound like them. Their performances are good but don't really stand out. Dafoe on the other hand is great as usual and I wish he had more to work with. 12 Minutes feels like an experiment more than a full game, a perfect type of game for gamepass. If I paid for this game maybe my opinion sours a bit, but because it came from the gamepass buffet it comes with no strings attached and for the 5-6 hours or so I played I was hooked and entertained. I think with some tweaks there could be a much better game here but ultimately it's a unique story driven game with a fun hook that I feel if you have gamepass you should try. |
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Posted by Dvader Wed, 25 Aug 2021 00:16:07
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