Twelve Minutes Review (BaDaBingDK)
Minor spoilers for the mechanics of the came, but no content.
The game is a classic time loop game, where you have to figure out what triggers the loop and how to get out.
And it is very fun for the first 2 hours, but the fun quickly fades away as you get stuck and have absolutely no clue what to do.
The game gets super tedious and boring, having to sit through the same dialogue again and again, trying little variations to see if that will unlock something new.
The changes between every loop are so small that you barely notice them or think of them as changes at all.
The game has infinite loops but only so and so many endings, with only one being the correct one, making the game reset without explantion or a conclusion to the story.
I find myself very good at puzzle and detective games, but when I reached 6 hours being stuck in this game, I gave up and looked up a guide, which revealed that I would never ever in a million years have come up with the solutions for the various endings and loop resets.
The things you have to do is so random, and you have to do them in a very specific order for them to trigger. There it's not logic and it just makes the game frustrating to play.
The game does not tell you when or what you did right to make something new happen, so you have to go through every scenario and dialogue option again and again to see if something new has opened up, often making you wait the full 10 minutes before revealing that nothing you did this time changed anything, which is really frustrating and boring if you ask me.
Lastly, the game has some minor bugs that led me to believe I was stuck several times, when it was just the game bugging and it took a restart of the game to realize it was a bug and not a game design feature.
And the game is called 12 minutes, but every time loop only last 10 minutes, so that also frustrated me a bit.
"But whyyy?"
I know that if you add some specific moments in the game, it adds to 12 minutes, but that is only 1% of the game, the rest of the loops are 10 minutes max before resetting automatically for no reason at all.
The idea for the game is very good, but the execution is very poor.
The game is way to hard, tedious and frustrating, when you are stuck and have abselutely no clue what to do, and when watching a guide you just go "Okay, well I will just do that then for some reason"
The game is not hard because stuff is hard to figure out, it is hard because the game does not give you any hints what so ever after a while and the things you have to do are so random, and has do be done in a very specific order and in a very specific place on the timeline to trigger.
The game can be completed in about two hours if you know what to do, but I reached 6 hours being stuck before watching a guide, and even with a guide I hit 9 hours before completing the game almost 100%
The game frustrated me more that is was fun, which is why I don't recommend it.
Is has nothing to do with price, but purely the clue design of the game, the frustration of getting stuck with no clue what to do, and the missing conclusion to the ending.
Buy it if you like puzzle/time loop games, but be prepared to get stuck and be very frustrated.
Because as most other reviews here say, is that the games puzzles rely mostly on trial and error, not being able to "figure it ot" whick is why it gets boring and tedious quickly.