This week of playing time loop games was very conflicting for me. On one hand, the genre (I know there’s plenty of debate going on about this, I’m just using genre to simplify things) is very fascinating and provides an innovative way of telling a story. On the other hand, the repetitiveness makes me so tired of playing the game that I don’t want to see the end of the story. Some mediums do a better job of dealing with this repetitiveness than others.
Let’s take 12 Minutes for example. This game goes through loops that last roughly twelve minutes each (its really like ten, but who’s counting?) Personally, I think the game does a great job of eliminating the repetitiveness I’ve felt playing other time loop games. However, that is exactly where the problem lies. This game was designed with that exact thing in mind, yet it still felt unbearable at times. It felt like I was doing a chore to uncover the whole story. It was frustrating because the concept of the game was so intriguing to me and I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it.
However, my feelings on time loops change drastically when it comes to movies. Watching Groundhog Day was a much more enjoyable experience to me. This, despite the fact that there were some pretty big holes in the time loop itself. It was hard for me to put my finger on why this was the case, but I did come up with something. Perhaps I enjoyed the movie more than the game because I didn’t have to do any work. Watching it unfold was, in a way, comedic. Watching it unfold in the game was tedious.
How could video games improve on this? For one, they could just disregard my opinion because there’s obviously a large market for time loop games. However, if they were designing a game for me, I would tell them to perhaps consider some automation for certain parts of the game, or even a way to skip to a particular dialogue where you want to do something different. The drawback to this, though, is that it takes away from the experience more than it would benefit the player. Thus, all I have to say is this. Time Loop games: they are not for everyone.
