This review contains spoilers
Well. To start, if I was able to hypnotize myself into forgetting anything else about Twelve Minutes and could leave myself with just the memory of how it mechanically functions, it would be one of the most tedious and obtuse adventure games I've played in a long time, certainly in any modern context.
Two of my least favorite gaming sensations are in full force here. I don't like when I've solved a puzzle but don't know how to get the in-game character to solve it [i.e. get them to recognize a key bit of information], and I don't like when I've figured out "what to do" and "doing it" is an annoying tightrope walk [especially a timed one] where if I mess up I have to walk through the monotonous steps again. That these two lovable garbage designs are placed in a framework where you're forced to repeat the vast majority of them over and over... hoo boy. Narrative loops don't naturally flow with game design so it takes some effort to make them work, and Twelve Minutes eventually makes some very mild concessions to the player to reduce repetition but they're not sufficient to making it a mechanically enjoyable experience.
But bad mechanics can be alleviated at least a little by presentation, and the one minor thing I can say in favor of Twelve Minutes is its focus on a small apartment and the voice cast it brought together was initially promising and intriguing. Yet not only are the performances not that good--James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley, the two actors you hear from the most, could have been replaced with anyone and nothing would feel different, which is a wild thing to say about two actually good-ass actors--but the way their performances are pieced together actively sabotages any possibility of them being quality. Dialog branches are tonally very specific and can be addressed in any order on repeat loops, so characters can flip between angry, defeated, happy, romantic, and so on with a simple click. I'm sure the game was put together with some sense of humor since it's a premise filled with inherent comedic potential, but it's still presented as a very serious narrative, so accusing your wife angrily of lying to you and then instantly pivoting to "we should eat dessert!!" is pretty jarring.
So mechanically it doesn't treat the player's time with respect, and its presentation is pretty rough, but even then I can be willing to accept those shortcomings for a good story, and I can be a sucker for stories where time is manipulated in some way. And before getting specific about what puts Twelve Minutes in a special circle of hell, I will say that there is, to me, effectively no subject that is truly off-limits for exploration in any medium, provided the subject is taken seriously, addressed with care, explored in a meaningful way. There are certainly subjects I'd rather not see addressed, but I'm open to the possibility that good storytellers can make good, respectful stories out of anything.
But the more that games have advanced over the years in terms of what they're capable of presenting from a production standpoint, and the easier it's become in a lot of ways to get into making games [and to be clear--both great things!], the easier it's become for poor storytellers to tell their poor stories. Twelve Minutes isn't a poor story because it "dares" to include sensitive/taboo subjects like parental abuse, incest, suicide, and terminal illness [as well as the potential suggestion of mental illness]. It's a poor story because it uses all of these--all of them--in the service of edgelord twist after edgelord twist, with the veneer of countless art films, without any exploration of how any of these affect people in the real world. And while I think it's safe to say the developer didn't have to spend as much time lovingly animating death as Naughty Dog or Crystal Dynamics did with Last of Us or Tomb Raider respectively, it similarly seems to take thrill in violently killing its characters, whether a certain loop naturally progresses to a character being choked to death slowly or you Adventure Game too much and find out it allows you to shoot yourself with a gun. A lot of it is required too, not just a case of a developer giving you more "tools."
Of course, once you've run into one of these taboo twists, you're going to continually "enjoy" them because of how the game is structured. Once you've seen a character slowly choked out, you can mentally prepare to see it at least a few more times. It is sensationalist, window-dressing misery on insufferable loop in the service of absolutely nothing. It's the kind of game that makes me not want to play anything for a hot minute because I fear it could poison something else. Metrics can't really measure how much I dislike something like this, but I can certainly try!
Two of my least favorite gaming sensations are in full force here. I don't like when I've solved a puzzle but don't know how to get the in-game character to solve it [i.e. get them to recognize a key bit of information], and I don't like when I've figured out "what to do" and "doing it" is an annoying tightrope walk [especially a timed one] where if I mess up I have to walk through the monotonous steps again. That these two lovable garbage designs are placed in a framework where you're forced to repeat the vast majority of them over and over... hoo boy. Narrative loops don't naturally flow with game design so it takes some effort to make them work, and Twelve Minutes eventually makes some very mild concessions to the player to reduce repetition but they're not sufficient to making it a mechanically enjoyable experience.
But bad mechanics can be alleviated at least a little by presentation, and the one minor thing I can say in favor of Twelve Minutes is its focus on a small apartment and the voice cast it brought together was initially promising and intriguing. Yet not only are the performances not that good--James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley, the two actors you hear from the most, could have been replaced with anyone and nothing would feel different, which is a wild thing to say about two actually good-ass actors--but the way their performances are pieced together actively sabotages any possibility of them being quality. Dialog branches are tonally very specific and can be addressed in any order on repeat loops, so characters can flip between angry, defeated, happy, romantic, and so on with a simple click. I'm sure the game was put together with some sense of humor since it's a premise filled with inherent comedic potential, but it's still presented as a very serious narrative, so accusing your wife angrily of lying to you and then instantly pivoting to "we should eat dessert!!" is pretty jarring.
So mechanically it doesn't treat the player's time with respect, and its presentation is pretty rough, but even then I can be willing to accept those shortcomings for a good story, and I can be a sucker for stories where time is manipulated in some way. And before getting specific about what puts Twelve Minutes in a special circle of hell, I will say that there is, to me, effectively no subject that is truly off-limits for exploration in any medium, provided the subject is taken seriously, addressed with care, explored in a meaningful way. There are certainly subjects I'd rather not see addressed, but I'm open to the possibility that good storytellers can make good, respectful stories out of anything.
But the more that games have advanced over the years in terms of what they're capable of presenting from a production standpoint, and the easier it's become in a lot of ways to get into making games [and to be clear--both great things!], the easier it's become for poor storytellers to tell their poor stories. Twelve Minutes isn't a poor story because it "dares" to include sensitive/taboo subjects like parental abuse, incest, suicide, and terminal illness [as well as the potential suggestion of mental illness]. It's a poor story because it uses all of these--all of them--in the service of edgelord twist after edgelord twist, with the veneer of countless art films, without any exploration of how any of these affect people in the real world. And while I think it's safe to say the developer didn't have to spend as much time lovingly animating death as Naughty Dog or Crystal Dynamics did with Last of Us or Tomb Raider respectively, it similarly seems to take thrill in violently killing its characters, whether a certain loop naturally progresses to a character being choked to death slowly or you Adventure Game too much and find out it allows you to shoot yourself with a gun. A lot of it is required too, not just a case of a developer giving you more "tools."
Of course, once you've run into one of these taboo twists, you're going to continually "enjoy" them because of how the game is structured. Once you've seen a character slowly choked out, you can mentally prepare to see it at least a few more times. It is sensationalist, window-dressing misery on insufferable loop in the service of absolutely nothing. It's the kind of game that makes me not want to play anything for a hot minute because I fear it could poison something else. Metrics can't really measure how much I dislike something like this, but I can certainly try!
FrozenRoy
2 years ago