Content Warning: This piece discusses suicide, sexual abuse, and murder.
Remember Groundhog Day? Boy, that was a great movie! Bill Murray lives the same day over and over again, using the knowledge he learns each time to do a little better. Or worse, depending on his mood. There’s a whole lot of suicide going on in that movie. Like, a lot. When that movie came out in 1993, I was nine years old, and I gotta say – I did not recognize some of the fucked up shit Phil Connors does.
While it wasn’t the first example of a time loop story, Groundhog Day might be the one everyone remembers best due to the presence of Stephen Tobolowsky as insurance salesman Ned. Or because, despite some highly questionable morality, it is a well-made film that’s entertaining and heartwarming. But probably Stephen Tobolowsky. That’s the man I want to look like when I’m right now, because I have to admit I already do.
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Since then, there’s been a whole bunch of time loop movies. Happy Death Day, 12 Dates of Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Palm Springs, and others I’d look up if I were paid enough. If I missed your favorite time loop – I dunno – I’ll try to hit it again when I repeat the day I’m writing this. When done right, time loop stories represent our desire to fix our past mistakes and the hope doing so will make us better and happier.
It’s no surprise video games followed this trend. This is a little unfair, but a lot of the gaming industry has long treated movies like an older brother they’re constantly trying to impress. Those of you who remember the ‘90s probably remember the term “Cinematic Experience” being put on every fucking video game possible. Even now, when a video game has a famous movie star actor, everyone loses their minds. I love Keanu Reeves, too, but man oh man. They sent him out there like a show pony to distract from that broken ass game.
That said… video games are better at time loops than movies are. Because, really, what are a lot of video games other than time loops? Every time you boot up Super Mario Bros., you’re playing the same levels with previous knowledge to do better and better each time. Massive RPGs may pack in thousands of hours of choices, but every time you restart one, you have the opportunity to do it differently – to do it better. I’m better now at Street Fighter 2 than I was when I was in elementary school, but the fights still start the same in the same locations with the same story.
Of course, there are games centered around actual time loops. And a lot of them are beloved classics. Majora’s Mask remains my favorite Zelda game because it uses its time loop to instil a tone of fear and despair, two of my primary emotions. You can save the world, but you can’t save everyone. Sometimes a lady from the bomb shop has to get mugged for the greater good. The time loop is heartbreaking because Link is a hero – he saves everyone!
Outer Wilds also did it right, building an entire science fiction mythos in the process. Here, again, we discover that while we can’t save everyone, we can still do something right and fix the mistakes of the past. We don’t just use the time loop to learn more about the world and what happened in the past – we use the time loop to solve a crisis that can only be solved with a loop. Also, if you haven’t played Outer Wilds, my follow up question is why haven’t you played Outer Wilds?
Which is why I think 12 Minutes bummed me out so much. Not because the story is a bummer – the stories in Outer Wilds and Majora’s Mask and The Forgotten City are all bummers. Overboard! is not a bummer, but it is probably one of the few games to be genuinely cheerful about murder.
That said, time loops by their very nature are a bummer. If there wasn’t something to fix, then it would just be a boring Hell of repeating the same day. Which, I guess, again is why Bill Murray killed himself a lot in Groundhog Day. Also, the musical was better than people give it credit for.
At first, 12 Minutes is clever. Without spoiling anything, you and your wife are having a nice dessert when a brutal cop shows up at your apartment and bad things happen. The main dude in the game thus enters a time loop and you slowly solve the mystery of why the cop is there and the secrets couples keep from each other and yadda, yadda, yadda.
Which is cool! Like in Overboard!, the loops are pretty short, so trying different tactics isn’t a complete chore until the endgame, which oddly is somehow most of the game. At first, it’s interesting seeing what happens when you don’t have dessert with your wife, or try to attack the cop from behind, or use a cellphone to call for help. And with James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe in the cast, it has to be art!
Except, and I hate to spoil some of the game, the loop isn’t magic or science or even necessary to the plot. We just kinda learn that the main character is suppressing memories of killing his father and marrying his sister. Worse, characters react to you knowing things about them in the most casual way. There’s one scene relatively early on where you convince your wife you’re in a time loop and she’s just kinda like, “Well, must be true.” Rather than reacting with shock and dismissal, everyone in the time loop seems pretty chill about the time loop.
And to be clear, I’m not offended by a mystery that reveals fucked up shit. I’m offended that the time loop mechanic doesn’t really earn us that ending. The game wants it both ways by using a time loop and throwing us out of the loop to give us the story beats we actually do need for the time loop itself to seem relevant at all. Which, again, would work if it didn’t feel so arbitrary and limiting. If we’re not learning what we need to learn from the time loop itself, why do we need the time loop?
And that’s what’s starting to bother me about time loop games. When done right, they can explore a tragic story or help a character reach redemption. But games like 12 Minutes are using this concept as a crutch – a way to tell a relatively simple, albeit tragic story in a form that makes it seem more complicated than it actually is. Not to mention the fact it’s a feature that’s nice to slap on the virtual box. But if the time loop’s only function is to make you trial and error ways to drug your wife until you find out what the game wants from you, you’re basically just playing a short video game and hitting restart until you beat the level.
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