Twelve Minutes (Zero Punctuation) 

I feel like you guys should put the ad/subscription stuff at the end of your videos. I know you want people to hear it, but it being first makes me think "ugh, an ad". As opposed to "well that was pleasant, I will now listen to your ad"

I was driving around while listening, missed the part where he said he was going to insert something instead of saying the twist, then watch an hour and a half of this game waiting to see how they weaved dog fucking into the plot gracefully.

This games kinda lesser version of dreamweb

Don't listen to those assholes. Just spoil the damn thing. Now I gotta figure out what the hell is equivalent to a Labrador rapist

You get the good ending by waiting whithout doing anything the first time you play the game or after the reset ending. Is more a joke than anything but is so you know It exist.

I watched a Let's Play where we were all disappointed there wasn't an achievement for spending a full 12 minutes on hold on the phone to a health insurance company while ignoring your wife screaming and presumably getting murdered in the background 🤔

@@MzyraJ so many missed opportunities!

And you got They All Fell Down.

A time loop game that doesn't have dozens of hidden achievements is just disappointing. I want an easily referenceable list of my weirdass accomplishments to serve as evidence that your weird ass game was, in fact, that weird.

@@zerokura or a more obscure reference, And Then There Were None

i laughed

i laughed aswell

I missed that part, too. And since I knew the twist, I was like, "Wait, when did that happen?!"

You speaking from experience there pal?

this is a joke in heroes of tomorrow - he teaches her to say just "time looping" and he is always onboard with whatever she asks

Honestly, there are a lot of works of sci-fi/fantasy/magic realism/etc. fiction where the plot would probably go very differently if the protagonist explained themselves to more people. Sometimes there's a justification for it, but in some cases writers seem to just treat it as a given that trying to tell your parents the brooding bad boy at school is a vampire (or at least up to no good), or tell your wife you've been trapped in a time loop for the last seven years of subjective time, or tell the police that you saw some strangely dressed people go into that building before it exploded, is not worth the bother.

I think that the usual counterpoint is that nobody will believe you.

@@gmakerc1 I mean probably not, but if you're in a time loop you've got as many tries as you want to see if it'll work

@@cheesi And you can always word things in a way that doesn't make it insane. Such as Keith's last example there. You don't have to say there are monsters, just say there are people with guns and you need the police right now.

Yeah well I can call getting it on with someone an exchange in microbacteria, funghi, potential viral components and a chance at a couple decades worth of alimony... but that wouldn't quite do it justice, now would it? Summed up; a couple thousand general gamers left their reviews and 75% was positive; I agree! The mechanics, acting, story and atmosphere were good in this game, and as a random who went in spoiler-free I got my money's worth in shock/entertainment/surprise value compared to plenty other games. Didn't feel like a grind at all; it's actually quite speedrunnable.

It's almost like if someone was just trying to make an artistic Oscar winning movie but was forced to make it into a video game. True artistic video games combine both their gameplay and narrative together to tell a story, the opposite of that is a David Caige game

@@simple-commentator-not-rea7345 I thought the opposite of that is when you keep the gameplay and narrative separate and distinct so as to offer a fun gaming experience. David Cage games seem still very focused on telling a story.

Yeah.

@@aturchomicz821 agreed. Not really. It was nice for him not to spoil the plot, but the comparison................ doesn't really work...

I also agree with him that it leaves you in a weird Limbo. like ... I don't WANT to encourge SPOILER . . . . . . The main character to bang his own sister ... But I just spent this entire game trying to save this man and his wife and now I"m going to go back in time and make it so none of it ever happened!?! That's just so unsatisfying! Actually when the twist was first revealed I was hoping it would turn out that the main character had an older brother he never knew about and THAT was the child the nanny had with the wife's father while he was born later with another man. But nope apparently he really was THAT child and while half siblings isn't as bad as real siblings it still leaves you in a limbo of not liking to ending but not really wanting to encourage the incest option.

The dog metaphor is used for a bloody good reason, because there's spoilers that make us more intrigued, and then there's spoilers that offend and disgust.

@@metazoxan2 "But I just spent this entire game trying to save this man and his wife and now I"m going to go back in time and make it so none of it ever happened!?!" Hey, Life is Strange did the same thing, and it was also incredibly unsatisfying.

"It was all a dream" is like number 1 in the donts of writing 101

@@Oblivion9873 If it's good enough for Persona 5 Royal, it's good enough for time loops

@@WaffleWiz That's not a good description of what happens in Persona 5 Royal; it's a billion times more complicated than that. It's also only the last third of the game that it would apply to anyway.

That's all fiction by definition.

@@seokkyunhong8812 OP obviously means in the context of the fictional world.

"perhaps 12 minutes exists so we may speculate about it" - Slavoj Zizek

I mean thats kinda how I saw Cuphead. A game i liked talking about and seeing other people play, but not one id want to or could see myself playing

It's kindof like an 80s-90s adventure game where once you've cleared it or seen it, you already understand it. Even if none of the answers make sense, you understand it.

@@Royal__Kitsune there's a difference between a game just not being one you enjoy playing and one that is better when watched. Amnesia is fun to watch but better to play, unless you don't like playing horror games. 12 minutes seems like it's just generally more fun to watch than play. Like David Cage games but less pretentious.

Ohhhh okay, i guess i must've missunderstood what they meant originally

What's even funnier is that, as someone that played the game, I completely understood everything he said lol

A sign that he's avoided spoilers very well

You need to watch more ZP, probably any from 2014 should rank higher on the "Dafuq?" Meter.

@@tripolarmdisorder7696 I've seen all of them, this just happens to be one of the recent ones that fits such description. Resistance 3 is still my most favorite one.

@@StrikeWarlock It's okay. I was just joking, I regularly rewatch the yearly mega-series' that the escapist finally added to their channel instead of letting a bunch of people get watch time on their own channels.

It is amazing how easy the gut works better than most critics can articulate.

So what’s the plot?

@@tuckerjohnston1844 it's the main events of the game, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence, but that's not important right now.

@@psugab Top notch answer/reference there

@@tuckerjohnston1844 SWEET HOME ALABAMA

Yeah but Daisy Riddley isnt a good actor! Checkmate atheists!

I'd say, and this is entirely my view, that Willem does a really good job in 12 minutes. Sure he's not really doing his best role, that's a hard competition to enter by itself, but he does a great job selling the roles he was given.

No way, he was the best one out of the 3

No they were all doing a great job, it's just their characters had 0 character. It's a pretty terrible idea to cast excellent actors to voice characters that can't develop by design because the game is a time loop.

I was excited when i noticed he was doing a jerma985 Impression

@ashy I mean when you cheat on your wife, have a second kid and let them go without knowing each other, then you find out that they are dating about to have your grandson and your solution is to tell your son to ghost his pregnant girlfriend without so much as an explanation, I'd say absolutely. It's not Husband's (that's his given name in the game) fault he fell in love with and impregnated a girl he didn't know.

@ashy The parts where he's talking to his Dad aren't. It's the apartment that's in his head.

I thought they replaced Dinklage with North because it was too expensive/cumbersome to get Dinklage to come back for more lines for additional content.

@@downsjmmyjones101 that too. With how little he was worth it, it was idiotic to even bother.

I remember being laughed off by a theatre class 'professor' something like twelve years ago when I told him I wanted to get straight into VO. He talked down at me and said I should be focusing on a stage career because that's where all the major VO talent was being pulled from anymore. I don't regret walking away from that class. Who knows what other mistakes I'd have to un-learn.

@@predcon1 VAs just seem to get zero respect in the industry. One stand out example is the Christopher Robin movie where Jim Cummings's name is nowhere in any of the marketing. Despite the fact that he's LITERALLY THE CO-STAR OF THE MOVIE.

the Video game industry has been weirdly trying to cuddle up to the film industry for a while now. it reached peak cuddling when the 2020 VGA awards had game of the year being hosted and hyped up by Christopher Nolan, who gave a speech about how the nominated games where all "pioneers of story telling", even though one of the nominations was Animal Crossing

It's also a pretty obvious twist after the point where Yahtzee mentions the satisfying first wrap up. Basically: "Oh no, Daisy isn't a dog molester!" "Well somebody is, and it can't be me! I'm Willem Dafoe!" James McAvoy *Shifts dog molesterly*

Spoiler warning for anyone who cares: What annoyed me the most about explaining the time loop to the wife character was how you do it the first time. Your wife tells you she's pregnant, shows you the baby clothes, and you have these two pieces of knowledge that should easily convince anyone. Instead, for some reason, you can't show her the clothes *and* say that she's pregnant, you have to show her the clothes and also point out that it's going to rain, as if the husband character couldn't have been looking up before he walked into the apartment and figured out it was going to rain. That would be the logical response to someone saying, "I'm in a time loop and I'll prove it by saying it's about to rain." Having to look up that step annoyed the hell out of me, to the point of just using a walk through for the rest of the game. This would've made a better movie than a game and even that's pushing it.

​@@Valiant_Requiem He specifically called the thunder and in some places thunderstorms are super rare. add to that the the news said clear skies and it a reasonable enough second prediction. It certainly wouldn't hold up on its own but add to the fact it's completely unrelated to the child/clothes purchase and I can stomach the argument. Given the fact that if he stumbled across her purchasing the baby clothes somehow he _might_ have been able to intuit the existence of a baby I am willing to believe her wanting some other form of proof.

@@YayapLives The writers clearly didn't want to actually wrestle with the plot point they were writing. They wanted the shock factor of, "I've been playing a dog molester this whole time!?" and not much else. Which is to say that it's all a shame, really. Having the opportunity to actually discuss a situation like the one the main character is in would be weird subject matter, certainly, but it would at least be worth examining for the purpose of being the point of the whole game. Sure, the time loop stuff is fun, but if the devs want me to care about the "dog molesting" plot point, they've gotta actually make the characters deal with it rather than _just_ be horrified and disgusted. But nah, the devs drop a random plot point on the player right at the end of the story and then give no satisfactory conclusion to it, hoping the player will fill in the gaps themselves and insert some sense of meaning and completion without going to the actual effort of putting it in the game themselves. I mean, the watch. What the hell was up with the watch? No one ever touches on it. Nothing is ever explained about the mechanics of the world. They essentially hit the player with "it's all a dream" or "it's all in the husband's head" and then call it a day, except the point of the story ends up being that the husband actually is a dog molester and the wife owns the dog that was molested. All of it still happened, it had to have for the player to attribute any actual meaning in their actions throughout the game, for the dad character to do what they did. If the father does what he does, that means the details of his life matter, which means the wife's history matters, which means... on and on and on. And so, if it all matters, then everything that ends up happening with the dad isn't actually some profound "letting go" of the past to focus on the present. It's the writers letting a dog molester get away with molesting a dog and then hoping you, the player, will be okay with it because otherwise you just wasted two hours on a horribly written story and you wouldn't do that, right? Let hacks waste two hours of your life? Right? ... right? But yeah, dog molester main character gets put into a time loop because the plot demands it and then there is no significant conclusion to the story since it's all poorly written, in the end. Who could've seen that coming?

The part that bothered me most is that the dog molester was unaware that he molested dogs. He came to realize it later and was like 'oh no I molest dogs!? I'm a monster!' Amnesia is rarely a compelling plot device, and hypnosis based amnesia is even less compelling.

@@ForeverLaxx this game would of been so much better as a comedy the gameplay flaws would still be there but the writing wouldnt make me care anyways

@@JakobatHeart it was just called dont escape and dont escape 4 was way better than this shit

_Tetsuo: The Iron Man_ would be _amazing_ in IMAX.

@@srbrant5391 Nah, it was shot on 16mm, so you wouldn't get much out of it on the ginormous screen. Besides, the whole grungy aesthetic is most suitable to DVD played on an old fuzzy CRT TV I think

@@ivanrzhanoy9389 You will get some _hardcore_ motion sickness though.

@@djvibekiller You haven't lived until you've watched the complete works of Jodorowsky on a screen larger than a house. *adjusts beret*

Hey now, leave that gem of a game alone.

Woulda been kind of fun if they included a way to skip dialogue and explained it in universe by the MC muttering what they were about to say under his breath lol

If it doesn't let you skip rapidly through dialogue (like visual novels and Bioware games) then that just sounds painful.

that's the cost of every time looped games. repeating every loop to find the way out of it with great payoff but in ths case of this game it hasn't.

@@KeithFraser82 it SORT of does. You can hit the "speed up" button but all that does is speed through an individual line, you have to do it for every single piece of dialogue and then for certain conversations you can't. I don't get it, either.

Ooh, that's unfortunate. Yeah, I encountered a game that was a lot like that: Don't Feed The Monkeys. It was a cool and new concept, but it ultimately resulted in watching the exact same little bits of dialogue over and over, not knowing what exact little piece the game wants me to record and send in to proceed.

Yeah like getting someone to take you to a movie right after telling them who the bad guy is and how he gets it in the end-- a tough sell indeed -;) PS: Went in spoiler-free; glad they had to guts to go for what they did. imho worth the money, will buy more of their stuff if they keep it fresh and immersive. those plot points everyone's crying about in reality cover 1% of playtime and is not what 99% of the actual gameplay is about..

@@interlace84 Well you now how endings are. As my cousin put it, it's not about how the meal tastes while you're eating it, the ending is the aftertaste in your mouth after finishing. Even if I really like garlic bread, the taste in my mouth after eating it discourages me from doing so again.

@@elegantoddity8609 ​ Oh I don't see myself ever going through it again-- I went through it a couple dozen times once and that was enough and all in all, satisfying. Atmospheric, immersive, engaging and at points hilarious even if a bit appaling by design. I'll watch a disney movie if I'm looking for rainbows & happy endings; this was still good thriller stuff with a shocker side to it for anyone who went in spoiler-free.

PS: Don't believe me-- ask the 3000-or-so players who took the time & effort to play *AND* reflect in a review.. 75% of 'em were positive.

@@interlace84 Well to be fair, it might be that more people thought that was bad and then didn't want anything more to do with it after that. Personally I'm more annoyed by the vague "it was all a dream" territory we got into, especially because the last "save people while trapped in a time loop" game I saw, Sexy Brutale, had *this exact same twist*.

"invalidating the player's entire effort by saying the whole struggle literally doesn't matter just isn't good game design." My interpretation is that you have to thoroughly explore all the information on whether the relationship can be acceptable. The fact that no matter what, no matter how hard you try, the loop repeats or you go to a worse place is surely more convincing to the character than just being told it's wrong and thinking it a few times.

@@sdmitch16 And that's a fine interpretation and all, but what I'm saying is that the game presents you with a situation, some characters, and what APPEARS to be the main conflict (the home invasion); you, as the player, feel that you're tasked with averting the home invasion in order to end the loop. But the home invasion itself is a total misdirect, it serves no purpose to the story OR game itself except to waste the player's time thinking they're solving the game's puzzle when they're really not. It would be better if the time loop didn't involve a home invasion at all; sure, that would lack a sort of climactic "final battle" and maybe make the player feel less invested, but anyone who would be invested would be invested for the right reasons.

@@Wandergirl108 they are directly connected. If you don't read it at face value, it explains his internal struggle.

@@Wandergirl108 it’s called an allegory. You should look it up, as should MANY others apparently.

@@perfectsynthetic Allegory or not, it makes for shit game design.

XD

May I recommend GTLive?

Yahtzee himself played through it with Jack on last week’s post zp stream

@@ramherrump oh cool!

Lol good one

Oh please, its worse than Shyamalan At least he only gets disappointment and can still pet spaniels without people calling the cops

"Unnecessary"? The story is about how lies and secrets can destroy lives. The nature of the twist is just one example, and it's one that's happened in real-life, quite a lot, by accident. This is what happens when babies who came from donated sperm/eggs grow up to meet their siblings unaware who they are.

What's the twist?

@@thomastakesatollforthedark2231 well, spoilers, obviously: The main character is actually the half-brother of his wife, and once this is learned it's *further* revealed that the entirety of the game up until that point is just the main character imagining a future where he married his half-sister and realizing it's a bad idea. He talks with his father a bit and then a few different things happen depending on what the player does, but the only way to actually end the game is for the main character to agree incest is a bad idea and then decide to not do in, with the different endings being various methods of making that decision.

@@aldar8240 You know I could sum up a lot of the top 100 movies of all time like you did this game and have people think it's not worth a watch-- as someone who grew up on sierra/lucasarts dos adventures and went into this one spoiler-free; Yes the plot twist sucked but it was a true shocker, and the hours leading up to that were solid. In my first playthrough, at least.I'll buy more games like this hoping they find some other stories to tell.

@@interlace84 I recognize I'm not the best at making plots sound appealing, all I was doing was answering the person's question about what the twist was.

@@aldar8240 You're a saint compared to almost everyone else around here :) no sweat

"The trouble with these rankings is the lack of nuance. Is it really fair to call Twelve Minutes the fifth worst game of 2021 if I was somewhat liking it right up until the end? In this case, yes, because that ending undermines everything leading up to it; if you get dragged into an alley by an angry chef and disemboweled with a broken bottle, your subsequent Yelp review probably isn't going to focus on the restaurant's lovely filet mignon." -- Yahtzee

I think that, in-universe, the British accent is supposed to be a Coruscant accent, so it's a little weird, yeah.

"gap yah" that made me chuckle :))

Oi, that's posh voice discrimination matey! Wot, you saying posh speaking lot can't be slumdogs????

it would make for a good foreshadowing as to her lineage if the next two movie didn't botch it up.

i went to school with a hundred girls who sounded just like her. Posh private school in england. They all had porches and BMWs and shit and were "daddy's little princess"s and couldn't drive for shit, so for entertainment when school ended we'd go sit across the road at the pub and watch the girls coming out trying to get out of tight parking spaces or trying to park to pick up their friends etc. So. Many. Crashes. It was fantastic entertainment for the lads.

When was the first time?

@@nathanrivera7827 Dark Void

He's from Oz, I'm pretty sure he's speaking from past experience/trauma, that somehow resurfaces now and again...

**SPOILER** Outer Wilds is from the 12 Minutes developer 😉

@@interlace84 publisher*

@@alechuntsman9524 Correct! 👏🏆

Play Majora's Mask. It was the first big time-loop game and it was really good.

bit out of nowhere maybe sorry xD but my first "adventure" game was Kings Quest 3 -- a couple pixels of graphics, heaps of words to read (and type) and hours of game-overs, save/retry and sometimes days of just being stuck and trying everything until you give up and try again a week later. Why the heck would people go through all that :| doesn't sound like a good time at all, right?! Well.. to me this game had that same something special KQ3 had in it's details in atmosphere/acting/story that just **clicked** and had me going through it to every very end. The plot twist's gross, yeah :/ but go in spoiler-free and it will hit as it's supposed to (just like how the main character breaks down over it) and summed up that's one tiny minute in all those heaps of twelve minutes you went through to get to that conclusion. Sorry about the rant; this game/dev is getting so much undeserved hate and the thousands of people actually playing and reviewing it on steam (like me) do tell a mostly different story.. about 75% of 'em are positive. My guess is most people on the extreme negative end (or on the fence) have either not played at all or spoiled too much for themselves to give it a fresh run.

@@MadWatcher you're a year late, skipped the "my guess is" part and are not making sense but thanks for trying anyway 😉

More than 3

What is your home like???

Now that is a game well worth your time!

Oh? What's it about?

@@explodingtomahawks7589 A murder mystery time loop

It is ALWAYS time to reinstall Sexy Brutale. It's one of the two games I've ever platinummed, though part of that is because it's very short.

What is it?

@@TheThunderbirdRising incest if the article I read is true

Please tell me. I have no intention of playing this game, I don't even particularly want to watch an LP of it, but I do want to know what the actual final twist was.

@@Wandergirl108 you can watch the end of the stream where yahtzee played it. They finish the game in that.

What is the wife also his sister

Tsk tsk no spoiler tags huh -;)

O M G XD

How many of them born because of dog molesters I wonder. Side note: EWWWWWW

Not to mention the amount of time all those years she would have been unable to really do anything else.

Curiosity in a game won't kill you, but it will fill you with regret.

Don't give into that curiosity. You'll despise yourself if you do. The "twists" are baffling and quite frankly gross.

I feel like he got that ending, but it's not really clear if none of it was real, it wasn't even truly clear that that was the true ending. Besides, the bigger problem would still be that the game 'till that point was trying to get you invested into the main character's relationship, but you can't really save their relationship, thus you're stuck into this "I want this relationship to somehow work, yet the relationship can't happen because of obvious moral issues".

According to Wikipedia, it was originally supposed to come out in 2016 and was being talked about/publicized before that.

God I was kinda clinging for this to be somewhat similar. Perhaps anthology style. I really want more Ghost Trick.

@@pedropradacarciofi2517 I know that. It just felt like... with a game this dynamic, where you could attempt anything, even a peaceful solution where no one dies and everything's okay, *that's* the only way to get an ending? That's the one they went for? I didn't even play it, and I felt cheated.

@@aturchomicz821 I tried but I'm completely out of tears...

That's one way to bugger up a promising story. I honestly thought the cop was the murderer, but no.

@@abloogywoogywoo I thought the cop was going to be the long lost brother!

@@coltonallgire1135 ... What are you talking about? He is! They're half-brother and half-sister.

@@SevenEllen I was referring above to the cop

Yeah. And, in the secret good ending, the protagonist get eaten by a pack of poodles.

"When will the game industry represent us?!" -North American Man Dog Love Association [/SATIRE]

@@KeithFraser82 You don't need a "satire" tag on something that's clearly a parody of something else.

@@hoodedman6579 The world has gone so bananas in the last few years that I've learned there's no parody so absurd it can't be mistaken for something serious.

@@hoodedman6579 unfortunaly, what is "clearly" or not has become a very contentious point

As a big fan of those types of games, I can see your point and the flaw in how you're looking at them. They're meant to be games of exploration. You're taking in how this virtual world works, and trying new things. In the best case scenario, trying random stuff will yield hints that result in an "Ah ha!" moment that in turn makes you feel smart for combining two different facts that you learnt. In the worst case scenario, there's no relation between cause and effect. For example, in the Secret of Monkey Island, you have to find a pressed skull for a recipe. The game is weird and wacky, and there's a pirate flag with a skull on it. Earlier in the game you got a map that turned out to be dancing instructions, that actually turned out to be directions. So you've already learnt that instructions are not what they seem, so you try out the flag and it works. This in turn learns you that ingredients can be substituted. Later you need to get a root to make a potion to get rid of ghosts, you do it (no substitutes), and it works. Then at the end of game you lose that potion and start getting beaten up by the Ghost Pirate LeChuck. But it's already been established that potions made of roots kill ghosts and stupid substitutes are acceptable, so why not try a can of root beer? With that whole explanation, it actually makes sense, especially when you reach that point in the game, since you already have all of the information needed. But if I just said that you have to use a can of root beer to beat the ghost at the end of the game, it sounds like complete random nonsense that no one would be able to figure out. That's because it does make sense, in context, thanks to the exploration done earlier. The exploration of the world and how it works, along with putting it all together, is what is supposed to make these games satisfying. Every dialog, every character, every action (especially incorrect actions), should bring you one step closer to understanding how everything works. It's supposed to feel like researching an entire franchise on the internet, learning more as you go along so you have new things to search up and learn, but instead it's a game about using seemingly random items on seemingly random objects. Of course if you have a boring game world, no one is going to want to explore it.

srsly man there's gotta be some dude with a grudge out there spamming negativity with a bunch of accounts or sth :/ **DISCLAIMER** Comments on this Zero Punctuation review DO NOT reflect the average user/peer review landscape for this game.

Deathloop

Majora's Mask: phfft, _posers._

technically it's arkane that created it, Bethesda is just publishing it.