Twelve Minutes Review (Zebra)
Twelve Minutes has a great concept and, for a while, it feels like a cool mystery that you're piecing together. But the game doesn't work like you might think it does. It's not solvable in a single loop; there's this whole investigation arc you need to undertake by learning things in previous loops and bringing them forward. I wanted the time mechanic to work more like Outer Wilds, and a little bit less like Groundhog Day.
The worst part for me is that, past a certain point, the things you're solving in each loop have a lot less to do with out-of-the-box puzzle thinking, and more to do with finding the right spot to click in the world. I ended up completely stuck on one step of a loop, and it turns out I actually did most of the right thing... just clicked in the wrong spot. Since I missed the click, I ended up doing a solid number of loops trying to figure out what to do before I resigned myself to looking up a hint and realized that I just needed to click an inch lower.
Couple that with the part where you're going to be re-doing some progressively more unfun dialogue/scenario set-up in each loop in order to get to where you think you need to be to try and figure out the next part, and you have a headache.
I wish Twelve Minutes wasn't so "on-rails" with the puzzle. It feels like such a cool idea, and there's so much potential to have fun, whether it would be through setting up weird situations through previous knowledge or by having interesting failure states, but unfortunately it feels like an oddly linear puzzle where you have to repeat the first ten steps multiple times until you either give up and look at a guide, or just give up and uninstall. There isn't enough of a sandbox here for me and no reason to get excited about what Twelve Minutes does. I just couldn't help but get the feeling that this game fell far short of what it could have been.
I honestly feel like you'll get most of the same experience watching a youtube walkthrough of this game. It's legitimately that unengaging. If you think, "What if you did this and this?" chances are, it doesn't do anything. You have to ride the rails to the end, or you just end up in an unenthusiastic fail state where you either wait for the loop, or force the loop.
I can't recommend or vouch for this game, and I genuinely feel like I wasted a bit of money on this one.