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Twelve Minutes


DisturbedSwan
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Started and finished this over the weekend, took me about 4 hours.

 

It's a weird one for sure, as soon as the intro had finished and I was put into the game itself I had a cursor and had to move the main character with the less analog stick, tapping A to move him to a certain spot or highlight an object or person in the environment, I wasn't expecting this to almost be a point and click adventure game. The art style and top-down camera perspective to the game is really unique too, some Hotline Miami vibes for sure as soon as I booted it up.

 

Once you get into the game things play out as you may or may not of seen in the trailers (I will spoil this just in case),

Spoiler

you come home to your Wife after a day at the office, fumble around your Apartment for awhile, pottering about and chilling. Suddenly there's a knock at the door from a Man claiming to be with the Police, he barges into the Apartment, handcuffs you and your Wife and then bludgeons/strangles you to death (I can't remember which exactly).

As soon as this is over you go back to the moment where you first enter your Apartment and things play out exactly the same as they did before, your wife greets you, asks you about similar topics, reads her book etc. Until the same cop turns up and repeats the same actions as before. You're stuck in a time loop, Groundhog Day style. 

 

Your goal is to escape the timeloop by not dying, to do this you have to repeat the same loop over and over, changing up certain things, asking your Wife questions (that then open up new dialogue options down the line) until you can eventually not die and escape the timeloop. It's a cool premise but after a few hours you start to realise this is just like the bit in PT where everything is Red and you're going round and round in circles trying to do something different to get the SH trailer pop up at the end. It gets tedious real quick unfortunately, after awhile of going around banging my head up against the wall, exhausting all dialogue options with the Wife, trying to get think of new things to try I gave up and looked up a Guide to show me a few tips of what to do next. With the guide it wasn't too frustrating, for loop-after-loop I'd try to do things myself but if after awhile I was banging my head up against the wall I'd consult the guide to get to the next 'checkpoint' and closer to my goal. 

 

There are some pretty mad revelations, twists and turns along the way which I won't spoil. But yeah, it's a weird game, I do recommend it and I did enjoy my time with it but if I hadn't of looked up a guide when I got stuck I most likely would've just given up on it as it was just frustrating the hell out of me.

 

Pics:


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I just mentioned it in the other thread as I didn't want to open a topic just to bash a game.

 

Basically this is a really cool premise but in terms of game design is pretty awful all around. It's not so much the trial & error per se that's bad, it's the lack of feedback from the game whther you're at least going in the right direction or not. The thing with the light switch for example drove me nuts, it's pretty obvious what the game wants you to do, but even 90 minutes later I wasn't even close to getting the policeman to activate it because from what I can tell (I looked up a guide earlier) there's only really one way to get him to do it even though there are probably a dozen more that logically make sense. In a way this reminds me of bad adventure games where it's basically impossible to figure out a solution other than just randomly trying to combine every item with every other item in the inventory.

 

Controls and such are also super finnicky and depending on what you want to try out you have to be kind of quick about it so that's yet another game issue that piles on top.

 

Really glad I still have Gamepass for a couple of weeks because otherwise I would have bought this blind and be kind of annoyed right now. Just a big disappointment.

 

I'd also like to add that while the acting and presentation is usually pretty good (despite some sentences getting cut off due to how dynamic everything is), there are some odd moments that should be serious but due to how they're presented they come across as hilarious.

Spoiler

For example, if you let your wife press the light switch for a second time, which will kill her, she just drops dead and when you hover the cursor over her it says "Wife (dead)" while the protagonist has literally no reaction to it. If you then go search her body and pick up the book about meditation he even makes a snarky remark.

 

I think what the game needs, outside of just polish, is some kind of item flowchart that highlights items that have yet to be "explored", i.e. made use in every scenario. If you really wanted to you could ignore it but if you needed a bit of help without relying on a guide you could use this to figure out some stuff. Maybe even go a bit deeper with interaction hints or something. Maybe that's just a lazy workaround for a game but as it is it's just a frustrating mess.

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2 hours ago, Maryokutai said:

I think what the game needs, outside of just polish, is some kind of item flowchart that highlights items that have yet to be "explored", i.e. made use in every scenario. If you really wanted to you could ignore it but if you needed a bit of help without relying on a guide you could use this to figure out some stuff. Maybe even go a bit deeper with interaction hints or something. Maybe that's just a lazy workaround for a game but as it is it's just a frustrating mess.

 

Yeah I agree. Some kind of hint system or highlighting of items as you say would've done it a world of good, I didn't want my handheld but at the same time I didn't want to feel like I have no clue what to do next after exhausting all available logical options I can think of. Even something like 'try picking up the knife then looking in the Bathroom...' would've helped and would've still let you do some of the legwork.

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So I went through the guide a bit more in detail to see what I'd need to do to get to the end (or one end at least). Yeah, not going to bother, at that point I might just watch a walkthrough but then again I'm so annoyed that this turned out so bad that I'll just pretend it never happened and kick it off the hard drive. The first real stinker from Annapurna, hopefully also the last.

 

I've seen people mention The Sexy Brutale as a way better take on the groundhog day idea. Bought that forever ago when it was on sale but never played it, maybe I'll check it out over the weekend.

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