It’s easy to think of Save the Date when playing 12 Minutes: you reloaded the same opening conversation again and again and you reentered the same period of time. But the difference between these two games is that in Save the Date, you are the one who chooses to reenter the game because you are given an incentive to do so—you need to replay the game in order to get more information and thus figure out how to “beat” the game. But in 12 Minutes the player is deprived of such incentive and such agency: you are just forced to enter the loop without understanding why, and you are given the stress to figure out new information in a limited amount of time. This leads me to draw a comparison between replayability and time loop in games, and how they produce different emotional responses in players.
Replayability is an essential feature of many games. You might lose, but it doesn’t matter, because you can play it again and again until you get better and win. In this case, players are essentially doing the same thing again and again, and each time learning bits and pieces of new information in order to beat the challenge, which is to say break the loop. So, it almost seems like players create their own time loop in the real world by replaying the game. And this is driven by the player’s desire to win or beat the game. In this case, the time loop produced by the magic circle can be seen as an indication of player agency because you choose to create it and enter it again and again in order to achieve your goal (win the game). So in this sense, players feel motivated to enter the time loop, and many games do a good job keeping the players entertained, challenged, and rewarded for reentering the loop, e.g., you enter new chambers each time in a roguelike game, or you are rewarded with new dialogue options in Save the Date, which may push the game into a new possibility.
However, when time loop actually becomes the content of the game, which is a space of producing time loop already, it produces different emotional responses on players. At least for me, when I was even just watching the playthrough of 12 Minutes, I felt a stressful frustration: when you thought you did the right thing this time, but then after 10 minutes everything suddenly stopped and you still went back and not knowing what went wrong. In each round, I felt under pressure because you had to quickly come up with what to do this time in order to find new information and not waste this round. There is no time for a break. In addition, setting time loop as the content of the game almost undermines the game’s ability to nurture time loop by replayability, because 1. the player is forced into the loop instead of being given the choice of it, which might produce a feeling of loss of control or frustration that discourages them from continuing to (re)play the game, 2. after you know what is going on with the time loop and the big secret behind it, the replayability of the game is weakened because if you replay the whole thing, it will just be the same thing without the sense of curiosity and mystery and you already know how to solve the time loop problem.
So, what is the point of creating an artificial time loop within a time loop gaming space? Making players frustrated could be a potential purpose, but I wonder would there be others? Is game a fit medium for telling time loop stories? Is it better than other media or worse? Can replayability somehow co-exist with time loop stories? I’m interested in what y’all think!
I think a well-constructed time loop can be a good medium for stories. If done properly, the player/character can notice new things and uncover new parts of the story and world in every loop. We see this in Groundhog Day and in 12 minutes. I think the genre is very contradictory on replayability. On one hand, different endings to a time loop game can have vastly different consequences for the characters, such as the possible endings of 12 minutes. On the other hand, to many players it is not worth spending lots of time to unlock these endings, as the play experience may not bring many new elements. Some endings can be accessed by just changing one or two minor actions from an already completed playthrough, and no one wants to spend 8 hours replaying the exact same game just to get a different cutscene at the end. Ultimately, even though many time loop games claim to lend themselves to replayability, I don’t really think that’s true.
I think that games are an ideal situation for telling a time loop due to the autonomy the player has to make their own decisions. While watching “Groundhog Day,” there were many instances where I wondered what would change if I was in the situation. Games, to the extent that their mechanics allow, let players choose their own options. However, I do think that the replayability in time loop games is pretty bad. A lot of them require the same set of actions in order to win, so replaying them, regardless of the amount of endings, is quite boring and repetitive. The very mechanic that makes them interesting in the first place comes back to bite how interesting they are upon a second playthrough.
I think replayability can co-exist with time loops in games, but it may not be the best medium. I think about games like Until Dawn, with as many endings as it has, and I have not really had much desire to replay the game more than once because I did not think that it would be worth it to play the same game with very minimal changes only to get another ending. I suppose that in time loop games, when I would not only be playing the same game, but the just the same few minutes (or however long the time loop is) of the same game. I have quite enjoyed time loops in movies, and rewatching those movies many times to see if there were any plot holes, or to see if the use of time really made sense, but I do not think I would feel the same way about games.
I think there is a really fascinating difference between the way I look at replayability – namely, how fun a game is to play in its entirety again, after beating it, and how you define it – as the moments where a game makes you replay the same portions of it again. This dichotomy can be seen in a game like Dark Souls (which I haven’t played too much, so hopefully I’m not butchering this), which has features that fit both of these definitions. In the game, you are intended to die very often, and dying means replaying certain parts of the game as you are ‘reset’ to the last bonfire you rested at. This is most notable in one of the game’s encounters with particularly difficult enemies, bosses, which make you make an enemy-ridden dash to the boss arena every time after you die to them, without variation. The Dark Souls games also embody the way I see replayability by having what is called a “New Game+” mode, where you can replay the entire game after you finish it, but with harder foes and remixed enemy and item placement. I wonder if Dark Souls could be a time loop game of its own due to these mechanics.