Thoughts on Twelve Minutes?

I had a lot of fun and got to the credits.

Spoilers:

I hear there is more after the credits but I am a dumbass and thought I had to reset my progress so now I'd have to do everything from the beginning so... I think I'll just look it up on Youtube.

I also think it's incredibly dumb and bad, but it's also on Game Pass and short/weird enough to potentially justify playing it. There are also a lot of streamers playing through it as you point out, such as notable Twitch streamer VoidBurger.

I think I hate it.

The dialogue really annoys me, especially since it's a time loop game. There are times where your character says something with no tact whatsoever and then the wife gets upset, and that's just the end of it. It's not like he says something rudely the first time and then the next loop tries to put it more gently. Or when you call Bumblebee he just blurts stuff out stupidly and you have to put him in the bathroom to navigate around his stupidity.

@chaser324: Never heard of them!

Finished the game with some help from a guide, after finally getting too frustrated and wanting to be done with the game. For as dumb as I felt not figuring out what the game wanted from me, I felt just as dumb trying to figure out that ending.

@brian_: Nothing in the apartment ever actually happened, it was all a hypnosis session orchestrated by the father. Basically, your character tells him that you love his daughter (your sister) and he hypnotizes you to convince you how gross and weird that is. The watch is a metaphor. The cop is a mental device by the father. I kind of hate all of this.

@imhungry: @heelbill:

appreciate everyone getting back to me. ugggh i feel like ultimately i'll be critical of this thing, but my curiosity might be too much to ignore.

hmm maybe i'll give it one more week for the DISCOURSE to catch up and maybe that will help dissuade my fascination. also as a non-gamepass user...it's sounding like $25 might be a bit much for the experience.

@greenmac:

@brian_:

It's not exactly how I interpreted but I can see how someone would come away with it because it's kind of the cleanest explanation, though that doesn't exactly say wonders for the originality of the script.

Holy fucking shit.

I love a good time travel story. I am utterly fucking baffled at how this was the time travel story they chose to write. It's so, so bad. I'm glad I played this with my roommate so I at least had someone to be shocked with. Jesus Christ.

Edit: As of when I finished this game an hour ago, 9.22% of players got the achievement for choosing to leave...meaning 91.78% of players chose to have the guy stay with his sister.

Such a great premise to begin with, but the more I played this game, the less I liked it, to the point where I consider it a complete waste of time now that I've rolled credits. The twists are nonsensical and completely uninteresting, it doesn't follow its own logic, and it becomes so incredibly tedious and repetitious that I was this close to putting it down after putting a couple hours into it.

The voice acting is fine for the most part, but the dialogue they had the actors read was so bad they couldn't possibly redeem it. Doesn't help that the animations when the characters were delivering their lines are completely robotic and stilted.

Ending spoilers: When you really boil it down, this is a game where the twist is that it's all in this guys head, and that is quite possibly the most schlocky twist that I absolutely fucking loathe in media. It's so played at this point it is beyond redemption.

It's also completely unoptimized on PC, for some reason? I've got a 5950x and 3080 and it runs at around 35-50 fps most of the time, even if I turn the res down to 1440p. There were also a couple cases where the game sequence broke itself, giving me access to dialogue which I very much had NOT done the required steps to obtain in a previous loop.

I dunno where those 8's and 9's came from on metacritic. This game is kind of a fuckin' mess from every angle I look at it.

@bladeofcreation: Pretty sure that's not how statistics work even if those were the only two options, which they're not.

Just watched a playthrough of 12 Minutes...holy hell is that thing some seriously self-aggrandizing, Oscar-bait style BS. It wants you to believe it's so smart, and indeed some of the minor paths seem cool and creative, but the place it's all leading to is soooo dumb! To think if I had actually paid for it...

SpyParty's carving such a specific niche for itself that the animations need to follow the mechanics of the meta because that's what that game is. Characters move certain ways because they need to for game balance and nerfing a character can mean changing slight nuances of their walking animation.

I'm not saying that the animations looking good isn't important, but there are other priorities surrounding that aspect of the game.

So I started this thread with my initial impressions. Since then I finished the game.

Yeah, I don't like this game.

I was enjoying the game a lot, up until the last couple of cycles. It basically pulled a Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (Maybe not that bad, but still..).

Overall, I'd still say it is worth playing, especially if you already have gamepass.

It's not great, but you can flush things down the toilet, so goty.

I think the number of things they've account for, just based on watching the Quick Look, is pretty staggering and profoundly cool. The performances don't sound perfect and the point/click nature of the actual gameplay makes it look a little more stilted than maybe I'd like, but then you go back and watch Jeff playing this game six years ago and realize it could always be worse.

If things go fully off the rails in the final moments of the game, to me that's even better and makes me more desire to see Jan and Rorie continue playing this game, same as the Beast did with Yakuza Zero and Contradiction. My fingers are crossed that the Annapurna deal with Microsoft is limited to a year or less, but for now the only way I can experience this game is through others and this might be the most fun way to do so anyway. Damn Desus & Mero for releasing such a brief and heavily edited look at their play session!

I think it kind of collapses under the weight of its premise. My first impression of the game was that the small environment plus time loop mechanic would make for loads of different interactions and "endings", even if it was just insignificant bad/joke endings.

For example, I thought I'd flush the watch and get a funny line from a frustrated main character, but nothing happens.

Once I figured out the "trap" for the cop, I thought I would be able to clue the wife in and set it up. Nope.

It kind of feels like the long development was a product of heavy rewrites and cutting things back. If this was because of (and I'm not saying it was) getting some rather big names on the voice cast, I can't say it was worth it. Dafoe aside, I don't think the performances are good. McAvoy in particular struck me as underwhelming, if I hadn't seen his name in the credits I wouldn't have thought it was a big name casting at all. Ridley was just ok, in fact, I thought her accent was more believable than McAvoy's. Either way, if the choice was between a good Dafoe performance and having more, but unvoiced, interactions/branches, I would've preferred the latter.

As for the plot, I thought twist the first, incest, was... okay? I haven't seen/read the other examples of stories that contain it that have been mentioned in this thread but I didn't think it was too poorly executed. It could definitely have been written better but that is true for the entire story, in my opinion.

Twist the second, "it's all in his head" was executed terribly, I reckon. As with everything, things aren't explored enough, especially given it's a time loop story where you have adequate excuse and time to explore it! I think the story would've been better had this idea just been dropped but at the very least if it were explored in more than a couple of lines it might've felt like less of a cop out. If it were used more throughout the game (narratively or through gameplay) I may have felt differently but a couple of paintings changing doesn't really give the impression it's a core part of the story and thus, when it comes up at the very end of the game, it just feels tacked on.

All told, I don't feel like the game was a waste of time but I am glad I played it via Game Pass. I think from the start of the game up until you are trying to unravel the wife's father's murder mystery plot set higher expectations that weren't met by the back end of the story and that the time loop in a room premise wasn't utilised nearly as much as it could've been.

Huh, I thought of the three, Ridley's was the better performance. A lot of people seem to like Dafoe's, which I don't think was terrible, better in some spots than others, but mostly replaceable with just about any other regular voice actor. Which isn't to disparage voice actors, but you probably could have saved some money there. Same with McAvoy.

I won't deny that I adore Dafoe, whereas I don't know of Ridley (I didn't even realise she wasn't from the US) so there's bias at play.

@dijidiji: Understandable. A lot of people like Dafoe. I'm not a huge movie buff. I think the only thing I've seen Dafoe in was Spider-man. And I guess I watched a playthrough of Beyond: Two Souls, so that probably counts too. So I don't have too much personal attachment to him here.

@nodima: To be honest the number of things they account for are almost entirely front loaded. Once you get to the point you can start affecting the loop, it becomes incredibly on rails. Things that you would think you could do at just absolute fail states. As someone mentioned on a spoiled post, there are items you can use to prove something, that if you use too early or too late will cause you to fail.

When you start it really does seem like there's going to be near infinite interactions and there's just not.

I think this was intended by the developers but maybe it didn't translate for everyone? Spoilers for the end, but that sequence got me to go get the watch immediately the next loop, which then caused me to realize it was going backwards, so I waited and that got me to the last bit where you are in the past with the father. So I didn't actually go through the loop again, it stopped right at the beginning. I thought it was a clever way of hinting at what to do next since the first thing you'd do is go get the watch, but I can see how annoying it would be if you didn't look at the watch for longer than normal because you pick it up so many times, so why would you stare at it in this loop?

I don't want to sound harsh but...at the end, I kinda sat there and said "it took that long for this?" I mean it's not horrible, but it's frustrating and repetitive with the gameplay. And the story is questionable...I don't really know how I feel, other than having some fun when things actually worked out how I planned.

Overall, my feelings are kinda in the middle with the whole thing. I enjoyed the ideas it had but the story is something else...and the gameplay needs quality of life stuff. Judging by a lot of people's comments, I feel like I got a "lucky" playthrough in that I took about 3-4 hours and I didn't use a guide or walkthrough. By "lucky" I mean that I picked up on what to do and found the solutions pretty quickly, and the solutions I thought of worked, and the game reacted as I expected. I think it's a problem with the game design if that doesn't happen for every player though, as seen in this thread. Sure, there are players who will get the right ideas and do the right stuff, but there's also players who will try other ideas and then feel frustrated when it doesn't work out. Puzzle games are fun to solve, and it's frustrating when you come up with a perfectly valid solution and the game rejects it. Fortunately I didn't run into anything like that but yeah.

It's interesting? It has some ideas? I'm glad it was on Game Pass? I was actually uninterested until I learned it was on there, so maybe that's a positive because I played through and finished it? I dunno, but those are my messy, unorganized thoughts!

@onemanarmyy: Also this!! I was thinking of Sexy Brutale the whole time and that game has a fantastic story with really cool time looping elements. I also highly recommend it if you liked the ideas 12 Minutes had but didn't like the story or execution. It's also got styyyyle and great music and art.

@plinko:

For a game where the fun is in experimentation, it punishes experimenting far too harshly.

I super enjoyed my Sunday afternoon with it, and wouldn't hesitate recommending it to anyone enjoying this kind of game on your handy Game Pass. $25, however, that strikes me as crazy by a magnitude. About $9.99 I'd say might be fair price for this much content / level of polish. And use your mouse, not the controller.

I found it to be a rather unique little game & concept, one that I was looking forward to ever since Jeff's QL Ex here, and I generally do not care for any indie one-person effort. Like, "hey, sorry bud, I know there's only so much you can do as being only 1 human, you get my sympathies, and I'll also go and spend my limited time with something else." But this looked like fun. I wanted to be the one doing the clicking.

And I do love adventure games, prodding & goofing around. If there's an objective, a waypoint, a task a game tells me to do, or heavily implies, or looks like the logical solution … I'll *always* do my hardest to go the opposite way first. I find much pleasure in, if despite all that, I find stuff that was still accounted for, acknowledged, rewarded in some way. Or when I find alternate solutions that also work.

Did Twelve Minutes fail at that, at times? Sure did. Was I annoyed when it prescribed a very rigid order and placement of items, for no particular reason? Mildly so. The loop being this short, the play (and possibility) space this limited, they pretty much nailed the sweet spot for as far as this concept could go. Add a larger game area, or double the length of a loop, and this would have fallen apart. I'm rather surprised reading here even this much apparently already went beyond so many's patience. Bummer!

Oh well, I do love goofing around with possible options. For example, an earlier comment here was upset over how barely visible the knife is, although they still found it eventually, which, on the face of it, sounds like very valid criticism. Wouldn't you know it though, you literally don't need it! Ever. Anything you might use it for is all optional flavor, or there's always an alternate item. This is exactly the stuff I so appreciate.

Watch the Quick Looks or Nextlander's vid, and you'll know right away if you feel that itch to be the person holding the mouse. If you are only intrigued by the story, it's not for you. Having this as a movie, or as a short written story, that'd be inane. It works as a video game, and only as a video game. A rather fun one at that, which will take no more than a single afternoon of your time.

I just finished this last night, and overall I'm glad I played it because after hearing a lot of discourse about how dark this game is and how it "really goes places," I had to see it for myself. But my opinion of the game is that I can kinda see what the designer was going for, but I don't think he pulled it off because the gameplay becomes incredibly tiresome and tedious and really starts to get in the way of the story it's trying to tell and that the "dark story that really goes places" is actually pretty silly and eye-rolly. I know I'm not as sensitive to the subject matter as a lot of people might be, but the story is more dumb than provocative. Although, I'd really like to hear Luis' take on why this is the story he wanted to tell and why he thinks some of the things in there were "good ideas." But I suspect the answer is probably "to turn the internet's attention to this game," and like, mission accomplished I guess.

@player242 said:

I generally do not care for any indie one-person effort. Like, "hey, sorry bud, I know there's only so much you can do as being only 1 human, you get my sympathies, and I'll also go and spend my limited time with something else."

You do realise you're talking about a game published by a large publisher, owned by one of the richest people in the world, and with the budget to hire three of the most famous actors in the world?

@magnetphonics: Seems like you missed out on the history of the game. Watch this: https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/quick-look-ex-twelve-minutes/2970-13118

Twelve Minutes is Luis Antonio's one-man passion project. Little home side gig while he was working on The Witness as his day job. As you can see and hear for yourself, all the story and gameplay was already wrapped and finished back then. Ms Anna Purna only provided exactly that, celebrity voice actors, and the resources to polish it up to make it look a bit more serious. And I am glad they made it look prettier, and the voice cast grew on me, too, after a bad first impression.

@player242: It is pretty wild looking at that video from six (!) years ago and seeing how closely it resembles the final product in terms of script and mechanics. The Annapurna funding definitely helped improve the overall presentation with the voice acting, improved models, and mo-capped animation, but the core of the experience has been there since back in 2015.

The best thing about 12 Minutes for me was how much more it made me appreciate the Zero Escape trilogy. I should play through those again soon.

@player242: I'm fully aware of the story of the game's development.

And even if I wasn't, I could guess, because it's same as every Annapurna game. "Take already widely-anticipated and mostly complete game; Sand the edges off and throw millions of dollars at it; spoil the game in your own promotional material; Earn reputation for being highly original somehow."

I feel like the player is encouraged to stare at it in that instance because the husband's hand immediately starts to fade out as the time winds backwards. Maybe that is a reference that only plays for folks old enough to be versed in the time travel mechanics of Back to the Future, but seeing that immediately made me want to find out what happened when he faded away entirely.

Huh, I think I kinda remember the QL from this *years* ago. My question is... why the A-list cast for this indie game? I don't see what it adds. There are so many people who could voice them just as well for 1/100 of the cost. Are they banking on generating buzz from star power?

Yes. And it's certainly worked on at least some people...

I definitely saw multiple headlines from gaming and non-gaming sites saying "Hey, look at Willem Dafoe in this video game".

I'm at the point in the story where Willem Defoe wants to see the photo on the fridge. But I had it in my possession at the time. He is verbally demanding to be shown the photo. But I can't show it to him, nor can I give it to my wife to show him. Apparently I literally have to start the whole thing over again just to leave it on the fridge. Fuck this game

@magnetphonics: Yep! Happened to me to. And what pissed me off even more was I had that thought, you know? I thought, "Oh man, wouldn't it be really dumb if by taking this off the fridge, I fuck up and have to redo this?" And then that exact thing happened. Not to mention that looking at one photo of a place that he doesn't know somehow proving the wife's innocence is fucking insanely nonsensical.

@bladeofcreation:After that happens there is a voice line if you give the photo to your wife in a future loop , stating that you won't be able to give her the photo later so apparently it is a deliberate design choice rather than a forgotten loose end?

@magnetphonics: Oh wow. Well in that case I guess I'll just say it's a dumb design choice!

It really is. I got the dumbness from the other side of it because I never tried showing him the photo myself. I gave it to my wife first, so when he said that I was like "What? Why wouldn't you be able to give it to her later?" Seems like it kinda failed on both sides of the choices.

I just "beat" it yesterday and it's really... unremarkable? I was going to say vapid but at the very least it does what it sets out to do, i think, it's just not very good.
They set you up for a Groundhog Day experience and it's good at that for about an hour, then when you get the first ending and it doesn't end there's a lot of excitement because the chains are cut, anything could happen, there's a feeling that you'll have to do something really clever and inventive to uncover this mystery and solve the loop but that's not this game.
What follows is repeating actions, repeating dialog until you do enough combinations to see other "endings", and they aren't endings because that implies there's something notable to see, something else to be learned and there isn't, you already know the whole story pretty much, now the dev just wants you to see it another 5-10 times depending on when you want to quit the game.
Hard spoiler time:
Before you realise it's all just in the son's head, fantasizing about the future with the sister wife he can't have, the revelation about who he is is so fucking stupid, he just forgot about killing his father? Whoops! It's fine though because that's a fantasy, so all you're left with is the choice to forget, then father performs Russian brain washing on you..............
So, the story really is just "son gets sister pregnant, father brain washes him, the end".
I guess the bits in between are supposed to be considered as artistic or psychologically valuable? I don't know, the game doesn't do enough to sell me on that aspect at all, all we're left with is an extremely shallow experience, and the most remarkable thing is how little there is to it considering its extensive development time.
Hey making games is hard i know i know, and i don't know how the developer feels about the end product, but that doesn't change how i felt about it.

@plinko: At one point I gave her the photo and she said to him "There's a photograph on the fridge, go look at it" and I'm like, no, it's in your possession, what the fuck?

So I didn’t read every comment before posting, so sorry if I am repeating things, but the second half of this game sucked. The story goes from mediocre to rubbish nonsense with shocking reveals that have no narrative payoff and make no real sense. I’m not opposed to incredibly disturbing stories. But this one literally makes no sense based on the context and doesn’t have any emotional or narrative weight. Meanwhile, I literally just stumbled onto the final ending. I don’t even know what the requirements are to reach it. It felt cheap. Again a synthetic twist that doesn’t use all of the mechanics up to that point and instead is the result of an out of left field mechanic that was never used before that moment.

So the first half of the game? Okay. Not great but okay. The second half is just awful.

This really seems like it's going to be THE game that people mention when a conversation about a bad ending souring an entire experience comes up.

It's the indie version of Mass Effect 3, in other words.

The game has larger issues than just it's ending. It's just not fun. It's rules are highly specific and unclear. Mass Effect 3 was at least a fun video game at it's time.

To be fair many probably didn't understand the story and thought the ending meant something else due to all the loop shenanigans and just how much the game tells you to engage yourself before playing it. People usually overindulge and put way more symbolism into the game's ideas and what is going on. The amount of fun people can also have in the first hour is easy to sell on a youtube video. Most people don't finish games and will throw a good score after playing the game for an hour or two with a bud. Even if the game is short, many likely had a blast just messing around thus the high scores. That or the game is that dang good could be the fact it's also "different" like I hear people screaming about games needing to be. This sites' quick look sold most people even though this forum thinks it's trash. 10/10 youtube bait game would bait againg.

It's okay. Hasn't grown any more on me since I beat it. I don't know if it's a matter of spoiled expectations, or if the story just feels too contrived. It's not like I expected anything in particular, but I certainly didn't expect what I got, and not in a good way.

Still a great premise for a game though. Don't think they made good use of McAvoy and Ridley with the accents they gave em.

I enjoyed it, sure mechanically it’s a little irritating, but I feel this a deliberate design choice in the way you unfurl information through different paths. The ‘denouement’ is not a bad spit take moment, but I’ve seen it done better in other media.

The overarching narrative is compelling even if it doesn’t quite land, is pretty layered in ambiguity which is not uncommon for premises like this.

If your on the fence, it’s on game pass and can be finished in an evening, and as someone with leisure time in short supply, this was a blessing.

Thats the thing. I've seen a lot of praise to the effect of "They really thought of everything!"

When in reality they've handled almost nothing other than the key path (Probably because they can't afford to pay Hollywood actors to say the 50 "But I don't want to use the candle on the spoon" lines a normal adventure game would have.) Everything else falls into one of three categories:

• Object has been made uninteractable because it presents an obvious easy solution that they forgot to implement
• Random action makes wife angry and leave for no reason
• Clicking somewhere makes Willem Dafoe enter the 5 minute long animation where he clumsily kills you