The start of 12 Minutes is unpredictable and full of action. A husband returns home from work to exciting news from his wife, but their evening is interrupted as they are accosted by a man claiming to be a police officer. The husband is brutalized by the officer, and his evening restarts from his entrance into the apartment. The middle of 12 Minutes is still intriguing, though less unpredictable. The player learns about the rules of the time loop, the wife’s history, and the circumstances of the man accosting the couple.
Towards the end of the game, the loops start to become redundant as the gameplay starts to rely on the player executing loops perfectly and being able to seek out relevant information in each loop. The player also learns that the time loops are not real but rather a figment of the protagonist’s imagination. The mystery is slowly being solved and yet the player is forced to interact with each loop from start to finish until they can finish the game.
This is the problem of solving a time loop. As a non-videogame genre, certain loops can be curated to exclude irrelevant information, but as a videogame, loops cannot be skipped. The player is forced to be just as fed up with a loop as the protagonist stuck in it. This can be a valuable way of using the interactivity of a video game, actually subjecting the person engaging with the content to the mechanic of the story, but not always.
Once the player is aware of the narrative conundrum that has caused the protagonist to be caught in a time loop, it become significantly harder to want to engage with it. The desire to engage in a time loop comes from the player’s belief that it can be broken, but neither breaking the time loop nor maintaining it is desirable in 12 Minutes. If engaging with the time loop becomes undesirable, so does engaging with the game, which affects playability.
