I really struggled with this and have just solved it now. My recorded time is over 2 hours and 6 minutes, but actual time spent was longer than this as I ran into several blind alleys that caused me to quit out of the puzzle and go back to the last saved version. I eventually had to start again from scratch.
I noticed that I am only the 51st person to solve this puzzle, so it clearly wasn't just me who found it difficult. I looked back at the previous four Friday 12x12s and three of them had over 200 solvers, but the puzzle from March 30th was only solved 63 times. So it seems to fluctuate a bit, with extra hard ones being thrown in every so often.