Three Minutes to Eight review

Intriguing, stylish sci-fi adventure competes to see whether your time or patience runs out first

What if you knew that you were going to die at a precise time in the very near future—not how exactly, but the specific time of your predestined end? Working under the assumption that you’d like to avoid dying, you’d probably try to put yourself in a safe situation at that time, away from any obvious hazards or dangers. In the forebodingly titled Three Minutes to Eight, from Estonian developer Chaosmonger Studio (creator of ENCODYA with nearly two decades of experience in movie production), you awaken in your apartment from a lengthy nap at 7:33 pm. The intercom to your flat is beeping, and a mysteriously familiar voice on the other end is warning you about the coming apocalypse—one that they seem certain only you can stop.

Your in-game character won’t realize it at first, but he’s got exactly 24 minutes to live—no matter where he goes, what and whom you have him avoid or make a point to interact with, or how you try to protect him. He is going to die, whether from electric shock, an ill-timed slip and fall, or maybe just a good old-fashioned murderer with a trench coat and gun. Unless, that is, you can break the loop before the clock strikes three minutes to eight. How will you use that time, who will you have say what to in order to break this cycle—and what does the mysterious distant explosion that takes place at 7:45 pm have to do with all this? All will be revealed in a stylish but flawed adventure game that I ultimately feel like I admired more than I enjoyed playing.

Three Minutes to Eight is a run-based adventure game; each “run” of 24 minutes begins the same and, at first, will end in any of a variety of deaths, depending on where you happen to be standing at the appointed time. This is a point-and-click inventory-based adventure, which means there will be clicking to walk through the side-scrolling environments and a healthy number of items gathered. It would be a nuisance to spend your limited time retrieving every single object every single run, so upon each death, you can select one of your current items to store permanently in inventory through each subsequent wake-up. This means that by the fifth run, you’ll potentially already have your flat keys, a couple important food and beverage items, or some important technology that can play a role in one of the many possible endings. For anything you don’t select to permanently keep, understand that there is an element of randomness, so every item will not always show up in the same place if you don’t already have it—all of which is to say, prepare to be triggered if you have the unfortunate habit of leaving your apartment keys in various forgotten places on a regular basis.

Though time is clearly an essential concept in the game, the 24-minute countdown does not advance in real time. Instead, the game’s clock rolls forward one minute each time you change rooms. Significantly, the entire large outside street where the majority of the action takes place is treated as one large room for time advancement purposes. While you’re out in the street, you can spend as much time as you want exploring and talking to people without the clock moving forward at all. Once you’re at 7:56 pm, you know that the next door you enter will bring the end (until you figure out how to break the loop and thus finish the game).

The time mechanic proves to be a bit of an unfortunate miscalculation, however. Because time does not advance in a fixed fashion, you can literally spend an hour in a run exhausting the lengthy dialogue trees with the primary supporting characters out on the street—but if you accidentally click on the bathroom door instead of the hallway exit in your condo, you’ll have wasted two minutes of the precious 24 you have to spare. This mechanic would have made more sense if there were more doors to pass through, but since the bulk of the game is contained on the street itself, rather than strategize about how to spend your time, you will really just use your street time loading up your in-game notebook with a lot of clues (or at least, hints of clues) in just a couple runs, with no real urgency to hurry up with your end approaching. Though I realize the challenges of implementation, a fixed clock might have been a much better solution to make the player truly consider how best to spend each precious moment.

Even as you prowl outside, the rapid collection of clues and suggestions will not exactly make the solution to your dilemma immediately evident. In fact, the more you converse and learn, the story and solution quickly get weirder and deeper into sci-fi territory. The clues themselves do not remain in your notebook through each wake-up, consistent with your character’s apparently fully reset memory after each death—though they do oddly accumulate within a journal in the menu that files them under different “Paths”—so you’ll want to remedy that by keeping your own external notes of what you’ve learned (and how you learned it) and what you need to do. It’s not very user-friendly, but old-school gamers like me should really appreciate the need to keep that old-fashioned pen and paper next to the computer.

Three Minutes to Eight

Genre:	Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Side-scroller
Theme:	Time travel
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

There are some amusing curveballs thrown as well. In my fifth run, when trying to leave the flat, the character just refused to obey me, saying he was tired of someone pulling his strings and proceeding to light up a cigarette as four in-game minutes passed and the run eventually ended with yet another in-flat death. Two runs later, as I stepped outside of the apartment building, I was surprised to find that it was apparently now winter, with snow falling on the ground. Your girlfriend Monique also seems to have some variance in where and when she enters your life during this short timeframe. How does this all affect the game? Well, as the mysterious individual on the other end of your apartment’s intercom (who says they are also stuck in the time loop) says to you: talk to everyone, take notes, look for patterns, and just keep going!

The aforementioned street, the central hub of the game’s story, is an impressively lively place visually. Despite the game’s late-80s retro pixel art style (it’s nearly impossible to not sense the inspiration of the forgotten LucasArts classic Zak McKracken), the street is teeming with passing pedestrians, flying cars of various shapes and sizes, and an impressive depth of field in the backgrounds, even though you are only walking along a single flat plane throughout. The characters are quite memorable, including multiple robots, an apocalyptic proselytizing homeless gentleman, and a range of street merchants who provide food, technology, and other key items once you hone in on the necessary dialogue path to get them. As unique and quirky as some of these characters are, however, they do not hold a candle in overall weird factor to the story itself, which is truly bonkers-level science fiction involving bizarre shadow organizations, advanced world-ending technology, homemade time machines, wormholes—and that just covers a small percentage of the game’s potential endings.

Three Minutes to Eight is fully voiced, including an amusingly over-serious narration, though the game makes one clumsy and unnecessary attempt to add realism by automatically detecting the city your Internet connection is based in and using that as the place you supposedly reside. When the narration gets to your city name, the dialogue is replaced by an ugly moment of auditory static; fortunately you can turn this auto-city feature off entirely, which I would certainly recommend. The voice acting is generally good enough, but the conversations can be a little overwritten—and the nature of the game means that you’re going to have to get through that same wordy conversation tree multiple times. There’s just no level of high-quality voice acting that will make me want to listen to any character say the exact same thing five times, so you’ll likely find yourself in a similar situation to me, clicking through the dialogue rapidly by about the sixth run. (The voice acting can only be shut off by turning the speech volume to zero.)

The key to solving the problem—as I suppose it would be in an actual time-looping scenario—is patience with the repetition. There will definitely be multiple times when it seems like you are wasting time having the exact same conversations, but then suddenly there’s a small divergent path in a conversation based on information you just learned. That bit of information opens up a new avenue in a discussion with a different character, and before long you’ve got a new track to go down. It will take a bit of time, and it’s sometimes an exercise in brute-forcing the game by exhausting all dialogue trees and hotspots over and over and over—and, as you’ll quickly find, learning how to navigate the explosion that takes place halfway through each run, where you should be at that moment, and what needs to be done before and after.

The journey is challenging, but the endings are varied and rewarding—and numerous; the game has ten potential different endings, most of which (true to the game’s weird sci-fi leaning) appear to exist in completely different universes from each other. It is possible to complete the game before reaching your first death, though this would of course be ridiculous without a walkthrough (there is an achievement if you get to a non-death ending within your first three runs), but many of the endings will simply require patience and repetition. I stress patience; this is a difficult and challenging game, primarily because this type of repetition can be exhausting and frustrating—we all love dialogue trees that gray out the options we’ve already used, so it’s disheartening to see every one of the lengthy options brand newly unsaid at the beginning of each loop—but it’s also so nonlinear that the exploration feels downright clumsy at times.

This is the opposite of a game “on rails.” Instead you may get 10 runs in before you feel like you’re making progress—and you won’t really have the patience for 10 consecutive runs with all the necessary repeating. So if you’re going to end up playing the 6-8 hours it will likely take you to get at least a couple real endings, I recommend playing in bite-size chunks, maybe one run each day, aggressively taking notes and hopefully forgetting just enough that digesting much of the exact same dialogue the next day doesn’t feel quite so redundant. Reading discussion forums and comment threads on this game will introduce you to plenty of frustrated players who gave up and watched a video to know what happened, and it’s hard to blame them. I certainly didn’t stick around to see all the endings, but I have to admit that upon watching the ones I missed, I admired their variety—and in many cases, the sheer audacity of their kooky sci-fi flavor. 

Final Verdict

Time loop game mechanics have had quite the surge in popularity in recent years, and it’s enjoyable to see an attempt at incorporating this fun idea into a traditional, retro-styled point-and-click adventure. Three Minutes to Eight mostly succeeds in the areas that matter: it is a game of atmosphere and style, it takes a fun old-school style and combines it with impressive visual technique throughout the main setting, and it does demand your thought and mental attention the way a narrative-based game probably should. It’s also very traditional in the way it plays, with plenty of inventory collection puzzles and dialogue trees. Ultimately though, I would have liked to see the clear sense of story and style less clouded by some of the odd design choices and repeated, over-written dialogue, because I feel like I admired this game more than I enjoyed playing it… Now why do I feel like I’ve written those words before?

Evan played Three Minutes to Eight on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.