A Dream-Like Time Loop
Three Minutes to Eight is a classic point-and-click adventure game with a time loop as the hook. It’s the third release from Chaosmonger Studio, whose focus is on retro-inspired indie games. While it’s a creative concept, the troublesome controls and cursory story hold the game back from realizing its full potential.
The premise is that the nameless main character wakes up at 7:33 PM and dies at 7:57 PM sharp, before waking up again at 7:33. Your quest is to find out why the loop started and how to break out of it. You’ll accomplish this task by talking to people and collecting items. Time only passes when you move from one area to another. This allows players to fully explore the larger areas without worrying about running out of time. However, some paths require a lot of moving from place to place, meaning you’ll have to start the loop over to accomplish them.
An Imperfect Port
It seems the developer didn’t consider the fact that using a touchscreen on an iPhone is less precise than using a mouse, especially as you can’t hover over something before clicking on it. Tapping with one finger interacts with a person or object, while tapping with two fingers examines it. Yet I was never able to consistently get the two-finger tap to work, resulting in the MC interacting with whatever it was rather than examining it or wandering off in a random direction.
The fact that a single tap also controls movement complicates interacting with things. The requirements for where you press are too precise, meaning that I’d end up with the character iterating on a spot rather than interacting with an object. Trying to pick up something small often resulted in me banging on my phone with my finger and yelling “Pick it up, moron!” while my dog looked at me like I’d finally lost my last marble.
A Clever Concept
Time loops aren’t new in games, but the presentation of this one is intriguing. You’re dropped into a situation where your only real clue is a warning on the intercom. You need to keep going through the cycle (and dying) to figure it out. Once you’ve been through the loop enough times, things change, opening up new dialogue options and areas. I also love that taking different story paths causes the world around you to change or distort in different ways as the illusion cracks.
Sadly, this mechanic is underutilized. Though the game presents itself as getting weirder the more times it loops, bizarre events stop happening after enough loops. Time-looping games can feel overly repetitive, but this game combats monotony by shafting the world to reveal new information.
However, it doesn’t escape monotony entirely. No matter how many times you die, the intercom in your apartment is always ringing when you wake up. Once you’ve exhausted all dialogue options, the sound just becomes an annoyance that demands your attention. You can leave without answering it, but it’ll still be ringing when you return.
Certain events always have the same narration, too, no matter how many times you’ve seen them. You can skip most of it, but it seems odd that the beginning narration changes yet nothing else does.
An Old-School Adventure Game
While not precisely a puzzle game, you’ll need to figure out what person to talk to or what item to use to progress. Once you get information from an NPC, you can question other characters or perform actions you couldn’t before. The characters have some depth because who helps you with which task can surprise you.
One item can be kept forever at each death, lowering the amount of backtracking, but information obtained from NPCs can’t. This means that you’ll end up spending a lot of time retreading the same conversations. Even the most creative dialogue loses its shine after the twentieth time. Thankfully, you can speed them up, but only line by line, not the entire conversation.
Blessedly, the majority of what you need to do is fairly straightforward. But missing an item or not realizing how to use one can grind your progress to a frustrating halt. Many modern adventure games solve this by giving you a nudge in the right direction, but not Three Minutes to Eight. The game does make a note every time you hit a major trigger, but it’s often unclear how to progress from there. And the imprecise controls make the old trick of trying every iteration go from tedious to nearly intolerable.
A Shallow Story
The structure of the game’s story limits how in-depth anything can be. The different endings can’t coexist with one another. That leaves no time for explanations due to the number of paths you can take.
And it’s a shame, because several of the concepts are creative and intriguing, making me wish that I could explore them further. Other aspects aren’t explained at all, like the fact that sometimes it snows rather than rains.
An Almost Great Adventure
Three Minutes to Eight has winning concepts, like the way that the world alters the more times you die. Somehow, though, the best parts of the game end up sidelined. The alterations in reality, the new paths that open up as you go and the complexity of the characters all take a backseat to simply having a lot of possible endings.
Over time, my interest in finding every possible ending faded. Each ending was just another vignette, and while I wondered what crazy idea would show up next, the cursory explanations didn’t feel worth struggling through the imprecise controls and repetitive dialogues.
