3 Minutes to Midnight – The hands that threaten doom!

Some would consider it to be a niche genre, but 3 Minutes to Midnight is an excellent point & click game that could stand amongst some of the greats.

Other than Return to Monkey Island, there aren’t that many point & click adventure style games that I’ve played in recent memory. It’s a shame, as in my youth I would devour the LucasArts classics even though the puzzles were often confounding to my young mind. They looked good, had fun stories, and would genuinely make you laugh. As far as I’m concerned, 3 Minutes to Midnight could absolutely have fit in with those thanks to its interesting puzzles and often hilarious moments wrapped up in a visually impressive package.

Initially, you are Betty — although you won’t exclusively play as her — a young woman who wakes up to the sound of an explosion in her 1950s American town. She and everyone else seem to have lost their memories, and Betty wants to get to the bottom of it. I don’t want to go into too much here for the sake of spoilers, but she meets an array of quirky characters in various locations around the town and beyond as she uncovers why the nearby dam exploded and what caused the bizarre collective amnesia.

The puzzles are mostly well put together, although you do get the old point & click “guess what the developer was thinking” problem towards the end of the game. I liked the inclusion of an optional feature that highlights dialogue choices for progressing the game so you can mainline things a little faster. What’s particularly clever is how the devs have gone about handling puzzles though. There’s often more than one way to solve something which can then impact what happens later on, including what options are available to you. 

An early example is you needing to get past a bodyguard preventing you from sneaking into a mansion. The owner of a local diner suggested getting him drunk so he passes out, but I found that you could convince him that someone was talking about him behind his back causing him to run off for a fight. The route I took resulted in my being temporarily banned from the diner, changing what I could do moving forward. I loved this feature as it really felt like my actions had consequences, even to the point where certain characters would or wouldn’t be present later depending on what I had done. Not only does this allow for a certain degree of ownership over your playthrough, but it allows for additional playthroughs to see just how different things can get.

The world itself feels interesting, and something that could have been lifted from The Day of the Tentacle with the slightly off-shaped buildings, brightly coloured characters, and repeated fourth wall breaks. All those characters were a real highlight, which is kind of essential for this sort of game alongside those puzzles. The local priest and the Fred Edison-like Ms. Dixon gave me more than a few laughs, and the admittedly stereotyped mafia types had more than a couple of excellent lines. The phrase “Cocks gun in Italian” gave me an actual belly laugh at one point. There are lots of little references too, from surprise retro graphics to an appearance of Officer John McClane if you explore and interact with enough ancillary points of interest.

There is a little downside with there being so many things to interact with though, as it does result in some of the environments being overly large or swamped with points of interest. The police station from the first chapter has a lot to look at, and whilst many of them are quick comments, if you’re being thorough in your hunt for solutions, you could end up faffing around an awful lot. This goes for some of the descriptions of items you’re looking at too, often going on far longer than they need to to get to the point that you need for progression. I really like the attention to detail, but I wasn’t a fan of how much time was wasted in some of the scenes. A key point of interest feature like the dialogue one would be a nice inclusion here.

Then again, this would have you missing out on a lot of dialogue that is predominantly excellent. The voice work is fabulous throughout, as are the sounds and, admittedly sparse, music. Most of the visuals are great too thanks to a solid art style and great use of colour. The little cut scenes here and there are less great due to the very limited animation in them, but it’s hard to complain considering this was made on a fairly low budget from a Kickstarter. 3 Minutes to Midnight appears to be a first effort from a new studio, and it’s absolutely one of the best games I’ve played this year in terms of quality and presentation, so a slightly off animation style in cutscenes isn’t really something to complain about.

3 Minutes to Midnight is an excellent point & click adventure game that fans of the genre will absolutely enjoy. Whilst there are a few things that could be improved, such as including a fast travel or making the console controls a touch friendlier, the vast majority of this project has come out very strongly. With a good story, excellent sense of humour, and solid visuals, this feels like being in the 90s again, but with higher definition graphics. Point & click fans should pick this one up.

3 Minutes to Midnight is available now on Xbox, PC, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.