I was looking forward to this one but wow what happened here. An Annapurna game about uncovering new clues by repeating 12 minute cycles sounded really intriguing, but the execution was much worse than I expected it’d be.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to figure out how to make progress in this, but I had many gripes with its structure. Playing through the same dialogue and animations to spot the little differences you need was interesting, until it got really tedious to replay over and over trying to find the one thing you need to trigger to move on.

This also did not control well. The point and click cursor is sluggish, animations were janky and kept glitching out, and the UI in general seemed much more tailored for a mouse than a controller.

The story I won’t go into, but didn’t like that either. The acting’s fine with a good voice cast (like Dafoe), but the dialogue all felt really contrived. And the ending twist was so bad that it just ruined the whole thing for me.

It’s disappointing cause the concept itself is cool. I liked the top-down perspective and keeping it limited to just a small apartment could’ve been better if the loops had more variation to it, but this wasn’t it.