This game is genuinely terrible. I played it with somewhat low expectations (as I do with most new games I play just so I can be wowed if it's really good) even after high praise and recommendations from so many other people but this game couldn't even bother to meet those low expectations. I'm not trying to be a contrarian either, this game is genuinely a humongous chore to play. The main gameplay loop in Silent Hill 2 essentially boils down to bumbling around a hallway or other such area trying interact with every single door you come across, constantly running into locked or broken doors and constantly checking your map over and over again to make sure which doors you've already accessed, until you magically locate the one that leads to an item or other area that lets you move to another room and...basically repeat what you just did. That's it. That is the ENTIRE main gameplay loop in Silent Hill 2, and it gets old extremely fast. This isn't fun, this isn't engaging, this is tedious and boring to the Nth degree. You do occasional riddles and puzzles sprinkled throughout the game; some of them were fine, others I managed to solve by complete accident without even knowing what the puzzle even was. And if you aren't satisfied with the incredibly boring gameplay loop of checking doors over and over again, you have the option of engaging in combat with (admittedly pretty bizarre and kinda freakily designed) monsters that lurk throughout Silent Hill, and somehow this ends up being just as bad as the exploration. Melee combat is stiff, slow, clunky and insanely repetitive, and the finishing kick to kill downed enemies is so finicky in execution that half the time I swear it's luck based that I'm able to pull it off without failing and having to readjust to finally HIT the thing. Firearm combat is just as bad but less troublesome considering they do the job much quicker than melee weapons and ammo is pretty easy to come by. Enemies in this game never feel like a threat, or something that fills me with dread and actively makes me not want to progress into the next area like other horror games have done; they're just an annoyance at best. There's no tension to be had and consequently there's no scares to be had either, as once the shit combat is complete you're back to doing the same dull monotonous routine you always do. And on top of that the "bosses" (if you can even call them that) are so laughably bad that it's genuinely a sight to behold. There's one section in the game where you're trapped in a room with Pyramid Head and you basically have to run around in circles avoiding his slow easily telegraphed attacks for a certain period of time until Pyramid Head just suddenly decides to piss off and leave allowing you to progress. Like...huh?? Am I missing something here? What was the point of that?

On the positive side, the atmosphere is nice and I thought the story was ok for as weird as it is, but these 2 are not enough to save this insipid slog of a game. Don't bother playing, it's not worth it.

As unmatched as Silent Hill 2's atmosphere is at times, with its incredible music and uncanny FMV cutscenes, I really dislike how it tackles the things it's "about". There are no real mysteries to the human unconscious here; it's all been categorized into clearly identifiable 'Themes' and 'Symbolism' based on a skim through the Wikipedia article for Sigmund Freud. There really isn't much room for interpretation or disagreement on what it all means.

The monsters represent James's repressed views toward his sick wife. The nurses represent James's sexual frustrations while visiting his wife at the hospital. Laura represents innocence and redemption. Maria represents an idealized version of his wife that he fails to hold on to. Pyramid Head represents James's endless self-flagellation. The appearance of the empty, decaying town of Silent Hill represents James's empty, decaying life. And I'm not a fan of media that can be boiled down to "this represents this", "x symbolizes y" so cleanly. It's so... sterile - like going through some kind of intro course for being able to identify themes and symbolism in art.

It's fitting then that the literal exploration of James's unconscious is similarly trivial. The game will present you with an initially daunting and unsettling place: an abandoned hospital, a labyrinthine prison - and then, right at the entrance, it hands you a map. As you explore, James marks down doors, dead ends, and puzzles, systematically demystifying anything uncertain about this place, revealing the artifice of all of this. It's just a crude process of elimination; walking door to door, checking each one off of a list. This is the problem with video games as a medium for horror: The tendency is to represent everything as a concrete, understandable 'system' or 'game mechanic' that sabotages any sense of confronting the unknown. These dilapidated ruins we explore throughout the game sure have an air of uncertainty, but in terms of our actual interaction with them, they're just video game levels, like any other.

The architecture of these spaces isn't very creative either. If you ignore all of the horror set dressing, they're mostly just regular buildings. That's unfortunate, because video games as a medium, while not entirely suited to horror, are uniquely suited to experimentation with architecture; they're the one form of media that asks the audience to personally inhabit and navigate a space. And considering Silent Hill is all essentially a dream projection, the developers could have gone in a very surreal direction. But other than a small labyrinth and one section of the hotel, you'll rarely find yourself in truly hostile or confusing geometry - the only real hostility you face is from the monsters.

And when James encounters these personifications of his most shameful repressed thoughts, how does he deal with them? Gun. The joke answer to "How would you make a video game about trauma?" After all, what did you think this was? A nuanced psychological horror/drama, the sort that you would find in an actual artistic medium? This is a video game, dude. Your actual engagement with these complex issues can only be in the most braindead ways imaginable.

Maybe this would be forgivable if the combat had more complexity than the story - but it doesn't. James is supposed to be a wimpy civilian, but thanks to auto-aim he shoots like a trained sniper. Even this would be excusable, though, if it weren't for the essentially limitless ammunition scattered thoughtlessly throughout the map. These two aspects come together to make combat a formality. The only way to really fail is to allow enemies to close distance with you and do melee damage. Then again, health potions are plentiful (and can be used while the game is paused), making even this threat moot. You can try to address these issues by turning the difficulty up, but this just turns the monsters into bullet sponges. That may fix the overabundance of ammo, but it also heightens the core absurdity of this game; you'll find yourself standing there, mashing square to unload shell after shell into a video game monster that represents depression. As you do that, ask yourself: is this really the height of "interactive art" or whatever people claim this game is?

Maybe my attitude toward SH2 is unfair; I will admit that the devs continuing to answer questions and debunk fan theories online 20 years later gives me a less favorable outlook. It could be my fault for letting content outside of the game ruin it for me. But I don't think that's completely it. The game itself seems to eschew any subtlety in its message, and the developers openly explaining the game's meaning online seems like a continuation of that lack of subtlety. I honestly think even the Metal Gear Solid series has infinitely more layers of hidden thematic meaning than anything you'll find here.

One thing I will give the game credit for though is how it assigns you an ending based on the psychology of how you play. If you fight recklessly and always seem to be an inch from death, the game is more likely to end with James taking his own life - reflecting the player's apparent death drive. And examining the knife (Angela's would-be suicide weapon) too many times can also result in James's own suicide; a great representation of suicide as a social contagion. Even if James retains the will to live, getting too attached to Maria will result in an ending where he loses all grip on reality. To achieve true redemption for James, the player must keep him in good health, avoid contemplating suicide, and keep Maria at arm's length while respecting the memory of his wife. This is a genuinely innovative way to implement psychological storytelling in a video game and I haven't seen anything else like it. And most importantly, this process is entirely mystified to the player; you don't see a tally of "depression points" or a scale between Mary and Maria telling you which ending you're leaning towards as you play. Unless you read the wiki, the game's process of assigning you an ending is a complete mystery - as it should be.

It's a shame the rest of the mechanics are so by-the-numbers, because this game's stellar art design deserved equally creative game design. And while it may have been a milestone for video game storytelling in 2001 (but then again, was it really?), I honestly think the medium has done a lot better, before and since.

Zagreus WhatsApp -
Megaera: Zag i NEED pussy
Than: Zag i NEED pussy
Aphrodite: Little godling, they all NEED pussy
Dad: fucking kill yourself

So something I occasionally like to do is look over query pitches for literary agent submissions, both to prepare myself for the day I eventually yeet myself into the slush pile, but particularly because a lot of the minutiae fascinates me. There are a lot of little does and don’ts that can make the difference between getting a rejection or a full submission: a lot of it, in particular, coming down to whether you know your target market and aren’t just some wannabe who doesn’t understand the field. Nowhere is this more evident in the space where you put your comparative titles — the books your book is most like. Generally, you want to make them something in your genre of choice released during the past five years, and also something not as well known. Conversely, doing things like comparing your work to a big book, something released far outside the last couple of years, or even comparing your title to a big-budget film are huge no-nos: all they do is show that you’re not quite well-versed in the genre you’re writing in, and potentially indicate to the agent that you think your work is more groundbreaking than it is. A good first impression can sell a work all by itself, and one of the worst first impressions you can give is that you’re just a genre tourist. You want to know your market, you want to know how your work fits in that market, and you want to show the agent just how well you know all of that while still fitting within the general bounds and structure of a query. It’s a tough balancing act, and it’s loosely fascinating to see where people tend to trip up, and just how tricky it can be to get everything right.

Anyway sorry about that preamble, I know sometimes I tend to go overboard with them, it’s something I’m trying to work on, let’s just get on with talking about the game and-

oh

oh

...

Twelve Minutes is a game where you play as a loving and devoted husband, who one day returns from work to have dinner with his equally loving and devoted wife. The evening goes off without a hitch, before a man claiming to be a police officer knocks on the door and demands you open up. Regardless of whether you let him in or he kicks the door down, he swiftly overpowers the both of you, demands of your wife to tell him where she hid ‘the pocket watch,’ then proceeds to shoot you in the head… sending you back to the beginning of the evening. It soon becomes clear that the husband is trapped in a time loop, and that not even staying alive can break you out. With no other options, you decide your only recourse is to find out why this is happening: using your foreknowledge of events to come to try and manipulate what occurs, all to find out why this cop is after the both of you, what the significance is of the pocket watch he’s asking for, and just what can happen within the space of twelve ten minutes.

I have to admit, it’s a fairly decent hook, and the first act of the game does a decent job of following it up. The apartment the game takes place in is small enough that everything you can interact with is well within reach, and it’s all a matter of experimentation: doing something, seeing the results, figuring out what you can glean from it, and how this information will help you resolve the overall mystery of the loop. I like the voice acting (even if the presence of Hollywood B-listers as opposed to professional voice actors makes me roll my eyes a little bit), and I’m also into how the game handles the consequences of your actions, and showing the disconnect between player and player character. Throughout the game, there’s a knife in the kitchen you are more than capable of using on your wife. Whether you do it for the funsies, or because you want to figure out what you learn by doing that, you stab your wife to death… all while the husband is freaking out, apologizing, and is absolutely horrified by doing this even beyond that loop. It immediately kind of brings in the reality of what you’re making your character do: taking something the player likely did out of curiosity and using it to make the atmosphere entirely, intentionally uncomfortable. As a whole, the game starts out well, with the premise immediately hooking you in and the initial stages providing a decent amount of options and things to do…

…only, as the game goes on, for you to find out that most of this game’s interactivity ends with what you already have. At the start of the game, the three things you can do in the apartment are to drug your wife’s drink with sleeping pills, hide in the closet so that the cop doesn’t know you’re there, and, if you do both together, you automatically indispose the cop when he tries to use a lightswitch. By the end of the game, these are still the only things you can do in the apartment. Most of what you actually do is navigate dialogue trees with your wife. And show your wife items to unlock more dialogue trees with her. And then do dialogue trees with your wife so you can then do dialogue trees with the cop. And this is all dialogue you’ve likely seen before and you are then going to see again all because maybe at the end of one diatribe there’ll be a new option you can pick, or that you didn’t pick before, which might mean something going forward. You might think ‘oh, can’t you just skip dialogue? that’s a feature that’s in basically every story-based game to sift through the tedium of seeing the same dialogue over and over again,’ but that’s not the case here. In Twelve Minutes you can skip through some dialogue… one line at a time, as if you’re going through a Dark Souls vendor’s dialogue to try and access their wares. And if you’re not actively in a cutscene with them — if you’re allowed to walk around the apartment while they have their dialogue — you can’t skip through it. You have to wait there, minute by minute, line by line, until you have the opportunity to step in and have something new happen. If you’re looking at your phone, or if you accidentally select the wrong option… whoops, loop ruined, go back to start, go through everything, manually, again.

Which, frankly, if the comp titles being intro-level Film Studies picks (which, like, no shade, I like two of those movies a lot, but also wow those are some basic bitch answers) wasn’t indication enough, the lack of polish and how… dated it feels, mechanically, really go to show how little it knows the genre it’s in. Even beyond the oodles of dialogue you oftentimes can’t skip through, the game’s so finicky and overcomplicated even when, on paper, it’s straightforward. At the beginning of the game, when I was meant to just mill around the house and have a romantic moment with my wife, I accidentally put my plate of food in my inventory when I tried to eat it, singlehandedly pissing my wife off enough to call the whole evening off. At one point, you’re directed to show the cop a picture on the fridge, but it’s not good enough to show the cop the picture on the fridge, you must engage him in dialogue trees that will tell him about the picture on the fridge, he’ll go and check it… only for the loop to be ruined because the picture on the fridge isn’t there. Because the picture of the fridge is currently in your inventory. Because you needed to show him the picture on the fridge so you then tried to show him the picture on the fridge. This then forces you to do the whole process again because, for a game partially about messing about in a time loop, and a genre/medium all about cause-and-effect and the consequences of your actions, this game is so rigid. There’s only one way you’re ever allowed to do things, and it’s usually the way where you find the item you need… then do nothing with it, instead just bringing it up in a dialogue tree down the line. For an adventure game, one that places a lot of emphasis on walking around and finding things in your apartment, it feels like the adventure gameplay runs contrary to what the game actually wants to be. Like it wants to be a visual novel but the dev is too busy looking up /r/movies ‘what’s your favourite psychological thriller?’ to realize that interactive media is more than just anime dating sims.

Because, like, if all the game wants me to do is go through the same dialogue trees over and over, then… why is this an adventure game? What’s the point of having to interface with your inventory and have to go through the whole twelve-step, two-minute process of drugging my wife over and over again at the start of near-every loop? What’s the point of being able to walk around my apartment during dialogue if I have to wait right where I am to do the next thing I need to do? It’d certainly be more streamlined if the game was only about navigating the dialogue trees it so wants me to navigate at the cost of anything else. And the game would certainly feel more playable if it had… any of the quality-of-life features that virtually every visual novel has by default. Why sit around, waiting for the game to run through dialogue it ran through before to maybe reach something new when I could just… skip to the next branching point, or the next bit of dialogue I haven’t already seen? When the last part of the game essentially boils down to “do this complicated and finicky setup to have a heart-to-heart with the cop, have an entire five minutes worth of conversation, then go back to step one, do the entire setup again, do the entire conversation again just to use something you learned during the first conversation to learn something new the next conversation just to go back and do that entire, unskippable process two more times…” why do that when you could just quicksave, or use a flowchart to go right to the point where things actually diverge? It’d certainly be much smoother to go through. And it’d definitely feel more of a match in terms of genre than the adventure game it currently is, where every convention it uses (inventory puzzles, the need for the game to be running in real-time) directly works against the experience and makes it feel much worse to play.

…I’m aware that this game’s ending is… rather disliked, and a big sticking point for most people I’ve seen talk about this game, but on my end… it was mostly just kind of whatever — its attempts to feel fucked-up and disturbing feel rather vanilla, honestly. And any chance for it to have an impact vanished when, instead of focusing on the immediate reactions of the characters, it just zooms into incomprehensible mind-palace shit and also you can fuck the whole segment up and you have to go out of your way to get back in and try again. Quite frankly, it feels like more of a smokescreen for what I felt were the game’s actual problems: how rigid, tedious, and finicky the game was on its way up to that point. There’s certainly initial promise — the setup works well as a narrative hook, and the initial stages are at least fun to experiment with until the game starts to show its warts — but when you can find ren;py VNs on itch.io and Steam with more polish and quality of life than this publisher-backed project… it becomes loosely clear this game thinks it’s more groundbreaking than it is. Comparative titles aren’t just buzzwords that your work might vaguely be like, they’re works you drew from, that were important in the process of constructing your own, and show to those with a more discerning eye that you’re not just a faker looking for prestige. And perhaps, if more time was spent researching the field rather than just throwing random psychological thrillers into your elevator pitch, this game could’ve been one of the many entries of the canon of time loop interactive narrative, rather than some brazen attempt at feeling like an innovation that it isn’t. 3/10.