Three Minutes to Eight Review: A gripping point-and-click game with a nonsensical story

Ironically, time loop games have fallen into a somewhat predictable structure. The only way to progress the story is to find the proper beats at the appropriate time. Every time you mess up and die, the loop resets. Three Minutes to Eight relies on this set-up to deliver its dream-like reality that has its annoyances but is a gripping enough adventure to get lost in its world while you try to find all of its endings.

What is real?

Three Minutes to Eight takes a lot of pride in its mind-bending premise. When you start the game, you see a message about how the creator came up with this idea in a weird state of sleep, and from there, you are dropped into a time loop story that has various routes you can take to reach a conclusion.

You play as an unnamed man who continually wakes up at 7:33 PM in his apartment and dies at 7:57. He has no idea who he is, and aside from the occasional fourth wall-breaking moments, he can only walk between the rooms in his apartment, the hallway, elevator, lobby, and the street block immediately in front of his home. Every time you move to a different room, time goes forward one minute. You could spend a whole hour in one location and time wouldn’t move, but keep walking through doorways and you will quickly meet the end of that run. Unless you reach one of the game’s 10 endings early by finding items and the right conversation topics, the protagonist will die in some Final Destination-esque manor, such as something falling on his head, a random person coming out of nowhere and shooting him, or some special death depending on which room you enter as the clock strikes 7:57.

The story gets pretty meta and is all over the place, but there are interesting moments sprinkled around that genuinely had me curious about the next step in that particular run. Moments like hearing my character from a different loop speak to me through an intercom were pretty cool, paired with the small changes you notice on every run. Your girlfriend can look completely different every time you meet her, and little aspects of the environment change, like the placement of a character, what paintings are on your wall, and whether it is raining or snowing outside. However, as interested as I was in why these changes happened between every run, I never saw any explanation for them. Things change without reason in this game. While my expectations were building up for some resolution, the game just ignored that I might be interested in these alterations.

While those little details can change between runs, the constants do get very old fast. No matter what you do, the intercom in your apartment is always buzzing when you wake up at the start of a run. You can stop it by interacting with it, but after doing this a dozen times, you just kind of endure the annoying sound. The same is true when you go outside and hear a man continually screaming, “The End is nigh!” Outside of talking to him and getting far enough away, there is no way to escape his endless proclamations. My other big annoyance was every run has an explosion at 7:45 that startles your character and brings in the narrator to explain it. I couldn’t skip the dialogue fast enough every time this happened to me after my fifth run or so. None of these outright make Three Minutes to Eight unplayable, but given how small the play area is and how much you see everything being replayed, it does begin to wear on you.

What year is it?

Three Minutes to Eight plays like a traditional point-and-click game. You move around the environment, talking to certain people to learn little tidbits and grab items that you can use and combine with others to progress the story. Playing this on a console with a controller took a little bit of getting used to, and cycling through environment pieces to interact with was a little bothersome, but overall, the game works well considering it doesn’t have a command menu. There is also a notes screen to remind you of everything you have learned in that particular run. Unfortunately, the game is inconsistent with things the protagonist remembers between loops. After a while, he can ask people if they feel like they are in a loop, too, but you have to wait for 7:45 every time to witness the explosion mentioned above to bring that up in conversation. Without being able to retain that knowledge for future runs until it happens again, you are stuck going through many of the same conversations. In that way, the time loop scenario is kind of there just to push you to find the next ending. Nothing interesting is ever done with this premise.

I also felt a little let down by how messy the story is. There is no setup or anything for the story. You wake up and try to figure out who you are and what is happening. That can work in some games, but since Three Minutes to Eight never gives you any definitive answers, your kind of left out to dry the entire time. The whole inspiration of this game is that it was a dream-induced adventure, and while I can appreciate that, every ending in the game is wildly inconsistent with the others. Without expressly spoiling the endings, the range of outcomes have nothing to do in relation to each other, and you will encounter characters that play completely different roles depending on the ending you are going for. There’s no continuity between them. You will never be rewarded with a true ending. You are just in pursuit of the various endings to see what sci-fi movie trope that particular ending decided to follow. Mind-bending stories are fun, but if you are someone who likes to have an idea of what the definitive story is here, you won’t find it.

Every time a run ends, you start back over at 7:33 in your apartment and lose new items you had in your previous run. Luckily, you get to choose one new item from your last attempt that you keep with you forever. While this does mean you will have to do a little bit of backtracking when you have more than one new item in-between runs, going through enough runs will eventually allow you to carry every important item without having to slog through a bunch of old conversations. This mechanic is Three Minutes to Eight’s saving grace. Had I been forced to obtain every necessary item on each attempt, the experience would’ve become unbearable.

Final verdict

Three Minutes to Eight is a fun adventure game that anyone who enjoys time loop stories or point-and-click games will enjoy. The true enjoyment isn’t gained from the destination; it’s the journey, so you may come away feeling let down when you find every ending, but during your game time, you should feel pretty fulfilled. While some of the puzzles and tasks can be quite the head scratcher, all of the clues are there for you either in the environment or in finding the right conversation with a particular character. It doesn’t fall into the pitfalls of past point-and-clicks of being too obscure, regardless of how nonsensical the endings are.

Three Minutes to Eight was reviewed on Xbox Series X with a code from Chaosmonger Studio. It is also available on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.

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