"12 Minutes" Mini-Review

Alright, I don't normally go out of order when I do reviews, but sometimes exceptions need to be made. See, I'm currently working on a double review of Death's Door and The Forgotten City, but having now finished 12 Minutes, I felt the need to get this review out there as quickly as possible so that I might be able to convince you not to buy it before you waste your money. Unfortunately, I can't express my thoughts without talking about specific plot points, so there WILL BE spoilers in this review. Just know that I absolutely don't recommend this game and leave it at that if you don't want spoilers. 12 Minutes is a game that has been on my radar ever since it was first announced. A time loop mystery set in a small apartment that boasts James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe as the cast? That's gotta be excellent, right? Well, as you already know, I didn't care for the finished product. There are 2 major reasons for this: the story and the gameplay...and that's quite a damning list of things that are wrong. Let's get this over with.

While not nearly as bad or contrived as the story in Scarlet Nexus, the story in 12 Minutes is about as bad and contrived as a non-anime story in this setting can be. You play as "husband," who is a nondescript guy given infinitely more life than expected by James McAvoy. The game opens up with you coming home to your loving wife (Daisy Ridley), who has put out a bunch of fake candles and made your favorite dessert for some kind of special occasion. After putting on some music and sitting down to eat the dessert, your wife gives you a present: baby clothes. After processing the news and discussing the future, you start to get up and dance with your wife, but suddenly there's a knock on the door. Your wife opens the door, and the man standing there claims to be with the police and accuses your wife of murdering her father 8 years ago. This cop (Willem Dafoe) handcuffs both of you and starts asking your wife about her father's pocket watch, and in an effort to make her talk, he strangles you. But before you die, you find yourself suddenly back at the start of the evening from when you entered the apartment. Now armed with the knowledge that you're in a time loop, you set out (so to speak since you're in your apartment) to learn the truth about your father-in-law, the cop, and the time loop you're in. What happened 8 years ago? Who is this cop really? What's the significance of the pocket watch? The problem with these mysteries is that they're great until you start getting answers. I'm going to go ahead and spell out what those answers are. The cop is just some guy who knew your father-in-law. The pocket watch has no significance, the cop just has a daughter with cancer and the watch can help pay off the medical bills...well, it has no significance until you can use it to travel back in time and break the loop at the very end...for some reason. What happened 8 years ago? Well, your wife did shoot her father in a fit of rage after he unexpectedly hit her one day, but unbeknownst to her, it didn't kill him. Someone else killed him maybe a month after she fled the scene. But here's the real kicker of this mystery: who did kill him? YOU did! Oh and you're also your wife's half brother from the affair her father had with her nanny. And you knew all of that even before you married her, but just forgot until the cop says something that reminds you of your mother. I have to hand it to James McAvoy, he PERFECTLY SELLS the utter despair your character feels upon suddenly remembering that he's married to his sister and that he killed their dad, but it doesn't make it any less stupid and contrived. I mean, I guess that the trauma of killing someone might cause some kind of lapse in memory, but come ON! This was the most legitimately stupid plot twist I've seen since...well, since Scarlet Nexus included moon colonists as a plot point. I shouldn't be laughing my head off as my character explains to his wife that she's carrying an inbred baby in the next loop while simultaneously thinking "wow, I can't believe he's doing such a good job with these lines!" Like, seriously, I can scarcely find the words to communicate how bad this all is. The whole "half-brother" bit could have been a devastating, heartbreaking revelation. But it doesn't have any power when you learn that the father called you up when you and your wife started dating, told you everything, and you accidentally shot him when he started beating you up for wanting to keep dating your sister anyway. Like, what the actual hell? And also...you get a call from your father-in-law, who your wife believes is dead, wanting to meet you and you...don't say anything about it to her? You don't bring up to her in that moment that her father, who she says died of a heart attack, is alive? That could've provided some interesting dialogue if it had been incorporated into the story somehow! That's really just the tip of the iceberg for how much is wrong with this story. Here's the thing: the plot twist is totally predictable once a certain line is dropped by the cop, but it isn't predictable from the beginning. Here's why I bring this up: the plot twist is just unique and unpredictable enough that you wouldn't even remotely expect it from the beginning, but that doesn't mean it's going to work. I bring this up so that I can compare it to The Forgotten City (which I will be recommending in its review, so no spoilers here). You could possibly predict the plot twist of The Forgotten City from the beginning. But even if you do, it works. That's the difference between having a solidly thought-out story from the beginning that logically builds up to a plot twist and just having a plot twist for the sake of having one. I hate it when I feel this negatively about a passion project by like, one guy, but I just hated how stupid and contrivance-driven this story was when it could have been so much better. Lest we forget, I've been looking forward to this game for years, so it's so disappointing that the story that seemed so excellent from the early trailers turned out as bad as it did. 

The other problem I mentioned is gameplay, so what's wrong with it? Here's the thing: In my upcoming review of The Forgotten City, I was going to take a little bit off the final score because there were one or two times when I couldn't use my knowledge from a previous loop the way I wanted. I'm no longer going to be doing that, because now I've truly experienced not being able to utilize my knowledge from a previous loop the way I wanted. Instead of one of two times, it was almost every time. I found myself pulling my hair out because the stupid protagonist just would NOT have the option to say the smart thing. For example: after a certain amount of loops, you'll have enough evidence to be able to convince your wife that you're in a time loop. From that point you can get information out of her or get her not to open the door when the cop comes. Never, however, do you have the option to tell her to just open the door and fork over the watch. What likely would have happened is that the cop would have taken the watch and then somehow killed your character anyway, but that's the point of these time loop games: figuring out what works through trial and error. The game is simply too restrictive in its dialogue options to be a fulfilling time loop experience. But it's not just what you can or can't say. The things you can do carry an illusion of potential trial and error, but in reality they're just as restrictive as the dialogue. For instance, there came a point where I realized I could drug my wife so she goes to bed early and can't be woken up to be interrogated by the cop. From there, my plan was simple: leave the pocket watch in plain view and hide so the cop enters the apartment, sees it, takes it, and goes home. You have the option to put down the pocket watch on the kitchen table, the table by the couch, the drawers in the bedroom, all sorts of places that would seem to imply that one of them is the correct place to put it. What I learned from this process is that the cop has a set routine if nobody opens the door, your wife is unconscious, and you're hiding (pretend the pocket watch isn't put anywhere). First, he checks the bathroom if the bedroom door is closed. Then he checks the bedroom, reacts to seeing your unconscious wife, tries to wake her up, then comes back into the living room. Then he checks the kitchen area. Then he goes back to the door, as if to start walking out, then changes his mind and goes to the one hiding place you have, catches you, and tries to kill you again. After I learned this process, I started going through it with the pocket watch on every surface I could put it. And you know what happened? The best descriptor for how restrictive this game truly is would be when I put the pocket watch on the kitchen table, the most easily-viewable area in the apartment. The cop went through his whole routine, clearly passing by the table more than once, then started to walk towards the door like he always did, then once again opened up my hiding place and handcuffed me. Know what happened next? THEN he walked to the table and picked up the pocket watch, then wordlessly started strangling me again. It's clear that there wasn't sufficient programming effort put in to match the level of options you have the illusion of having. He was about to walk out the door without the pocket watch, but then went after the pocket watch after completing his loop whether it made sense or not. But adding onto the frustration is the level of early adventure game nonsense that goes into making progress in this game. After going through the song and dance of placing the pocket watch everywhere (and even trying moving the fake candles to see if adding extra illumination would make the cop notice it), I became frustrated and finally consulted a guide.

The way to progress was to have the cop get knocked out from an electrical shock from the bedroom light switch.

WHAT?!

It's an established aspect of the apartment that you get a small electrical shock when you flick that light switch because the wiring is faulty. But in what universe is one supposed to naturally think "oh yeah, if I flick the switch beforehand and get a minor shock, the next time someone does it they'll get friggin knocked out by it!" And even if that was something a person would naturally think of, in what universe is it supposed to make more sense than leaving the thing the cop is here to kill us for in plain view?! Again, you could make it so that the cop sees the pocket watch, says "wellll look what we have here," starts to leave, then has a feeling someone is in the closet, and it might be frustrating, but it would've been actual trial and error and a sense that your critical thinking has been acknowledged in some way. You could even have it so that if the player tries what I did with the fake candles, that the cop sees the watch and immediately thinks it's fishy that it's being so clearly signposted. You can't account for everything a player might think of, but you could at least try to account for the obvious things they might think of. Normally I'd follow this up with a paragraph about the technical side of things, but all-in-all it's fine, and in terms of bugs, it's hard to differentiate between intentional restrictiveness and something going wrong in the code, so I can't really comment.

Folks, the final nail in the coffin here is the game's ridiculous asking price. I completed 12 Minutes over the course of 4 hours, and you might complete it faster if you have the ridiculous train of though this developer seems to naturally have. But asking for $25 for the most ridiculously restrictive, laughably stupid 4 hours I've ever experienced is borderline insulting. As you can likely tell, I didn't care enough to get pictures for this review or even to edit it. I just want the message out there as soon as possible so that you don't waste your money, since this game is suspiciously too long for you to get your money back before you reach the stupid plot twist. So I'm going to end it here. As this is a smaller game with less mechanics going for it, I'll of course be using my smaller game scoring scale where I can take off a maximum of 2 points for any given fault rather than my usual maximum of 1 point. 

Let us review:

Horrible story and plot twist - 2.0

Overly restrictive gameplay - 2.0

Incredibly poor price-to-value ratio - 2.0

The final score for 12 Minutes is...

4.0/10 - Below Average