Three Minutes To Eight

Review

You keep waking up at 7:33 PM and passing away at 7:57 PM on the same evening. That’s right, by all accounts you have 24 minutes and no more seconds to break the loop, otherwise you will kick the bucket.  But you have no idea how it will happen. So, my dear friend, you have until Three Minutes To Eight to figure it out! Oh no, it’s time, and I have no idea . . .   Beeeeeep!

Three Minutes To Eight is a point-and-click puzzle game developed by Chaosmonger Studio and published by Assemble Entertainment on the Steam Platform on the 23rd of October, 2023.

As far as I can see, after playing for five hours, there are eight paths to breaking the loop. Right now, I have managed to execute one of them, which is to kill my wife by shooting her with an old gun! How romantic. Still, I am close to finishing another four paths, but I am not quite there as I am either missing some objects or not where I need to be given time.

When you start the game for the first time, you won’t have any items with you and you’ll start looking all around your apartment and on the street, clicking on all the objects you can interact with within the 24 minutes you have in hand. The good news is that you can take a new item with you on your next attempt to break the loop. Thank god for that! The other thing you must do is to make sure you talk to all the NPCs in all your playthroughs. Yes, it would be the exact same dialogue over and over, but depending on the path you are following and who you are talking, new questions will appear in your dialogue panel. One thing that surprised me was that items such as paintings would differ slightly from one playthrough to the next. Even my wife was different in some of my playthroughs. What was before or after the interlude that led to her death? I can’t recall. There will be two events within the 24 minutes: both loud explosions. The interesting thing is that depending on where you are when the explosions occur, you might find something new. The developers built this game quite cleverly.  

Now, the 24 minutes are not 24 minutes, literally. A minute will pass each time you visit a room or a new area, and two minutes when you take the elevator (for example), which you need to do for the path I have completed. It is like you have an X amount of turns per cycle. Oh, and you can also waste time by smoking a cigarette, which takes a minute of your precious time. And it is by doing that exact thing that I stumbled upon something different on one of my cycles; because I wasted a minute smoking, I was a minute later on my journey when there was an explosion, which allowed me to discover a new location for a path.

So what happens to you at Three minutes to eight? Well, you’ll die! It could be a pot that strikes your head. A heart attack, being electrocuted, slipping on a wet floor and breaking your neck or simply someone turning up in your apartment and shooting you. Hold on, I shot the wife! Was I the wife? Maybe I got confused by playing the same 24 minutes over and over. 

The pixel graphics are really good, and the voice-overs are pretty nice too. As I mentioned, this game is cleverly done, but it gets a bit repetitive after a while. Sure, when you manage to figure something out or actually complete a path, it is exciting, but it will be a good while until that occurs.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Three Minutes To Eight Steam Store Page