But 12 Minutes also denied me that satisfaction by glitching out during the ending, turning my screen black while the audio played on when I quit and reloaded it, my save file had disappeared. Whatever the reason, the end result is a game that wants to be emotionally impactful but never gave me anything to latch onto, and the conclusion was so contrived I was ready to Alt+F4 and uninstall the game in a huff. Perhaps the developers wrote heaps more dialogue and ended up cutting 12 Minutes to the bone to keep it from being too confusing for players or too expensive to produce. The voice performances are genuinely great when the actors deliver their weightier lines, too and I found Willem Dafoe genuinely menacing from beginning to end. It never offers the opportunity to ask questions like 'what did you do today' or 'how's our marriage going?' or 'honey, what's your name?'Įach repeated loop was a missed opportunity to throw in some new dialogue or internal monologue from my character-the kinds of little details we've seen work so effectively in indie developer Supergiant's games like Hades and Bastion.

We learn about these characters' deep, dark secrets, but we basically don't get to spend any time with them in the present-even though time is the one thing that 12 Minutes has in abundance. Even when adventure game puzzles annoy me, I know there are some jokes and new places to explore as a reward for getting past them.ĭespite casting big name actors Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy, 12 Minutes seems weirdly uninterested in fleshing out these characters beyond the bare minimum needed for its plot. 12 Minutes is especially frustrating because it has nothing else going on outside its time loop mystery.

12 minutes endings