twelve minutes

Just finished it. It ain’t great to say the least. The ending is farcically, obnoxiously terrible to a near game-ruining degree. Some genuine moments of satisfaction when you figure out how to progress things, and some of the presentation is rather striking. But it isn’t even the best new time loop game I’ve played in the last few weeks (that’d be the Forgotten City). Lots of frustrating game and narrative design decisions. A real disappointment after such a long time in development.

Just under four hours all-in-all.

Yeah it really doesn’t reward experimentation at times because you’ll hit a dead end for arbitrary or silly reasons and just need to start again. That’s something inherent in the basic idea, but there were definitely frustrating parts where I just got stuck in the loop with little progress til I found out the very precise thing the game wanted me to do.

The terrible writing is the worst part of the game, but it’s amazingly janky for a game with such limited space and content. The characters move in a real unnatural way, and the path finding just straight up breaks at times. Even interacting with things can be awkward and janky - like the characters just pause awkwardly when you try to get your character to speak to them, or two very different actions being separated by just a few pixels. A weird lack of polish in places too - like having to click one object to switch to a first person view simply to click on an entirely separate object. It doesn’t feel great to play at all, and often the way the plot progresses or moves on feels completely unnatural or contrived.

Definitely dislike it more the more I think about it. There are a handful of solid ‘eureka’ moments like any puzzle game, but really it’s just a fairly bad game overall.

Definitely - it feels like the game 'cheats' with its loop more than I'd like. Without going deep into spoilers... you can, for example, persuade 'the wife' to leave the apartment. This can be done within a minute or so of the loop starting. Usually, 'the cop' doesn't show up until around 4-5 minutes into the loop. But if the wife leaves he just shows up early and brings her back to the apartment so the same situations play out as normal.

Feels like a fundamental betrayal of the concept, honestly. I know other time loop games probably use similar tricks for practical reasons, but certainly not as overtly and cheekily as was the case here.

To give the ending some credit…

The only real, canon ending is when you uninstall the game in disgust.