Twelve Minutes is a time loop thriller that doesn’t hold together as a mystery, a narrative or in some ways as a game.
There’s a theatrical sensibility to Twelve Minutes, with a very small setting, fixed top down framing for the action and tiny cast telling an intimate story.
Twelve Minutes features domestic setting, with the Husband and Wife in their apartment, with that being violently upended by the intrusion of the Cop.
And then when things get fatally violent, the Husband appears at the apartment door again.
You have Twelve Minutes until the Cop knocks at the door. Then the the cycle repeats.
Unfortunately that promising pitch is where things stop being promising.
There’s been a lot made of the voice talent behind Twelve Minutes. It makes sense! Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe are big names. Ridley and McAvoy as the Wife and Husband turn out sterling performances that have moments where they stand out, but Dafoe’s distinctive voice makes the cop a truly memorable antagonist. In spite of the constant loops, his voice never grates, and consistently draws the player in to the twists of his character.
This will be the last purely positive thing I have to mention.
As might be expected, the game design is reminiscent of an old school point and click adventure game. Lots of objects to interact with, you can click and drag things from your inventory to combine them.
So for example, pick up a mug, drag it from your inventory to the sink, you have a mug full of water and you can water a plant with it.
Clicking on these objects is how you interact with the world. It’s also how you can interrupt conversations you’ve already been through, and click out of set framing devices. Simple gameplay.
The puzzles are straightforward, but do suffer from the traditional Adventure Game problem of being incredibly obtuse and exacting.
After a while, the game reverts more to conversation and remembering dialogue from previous loops than finding objects or combining them.
The problem is that it’s perfectly fine as that type of game, except you’re trying to accomplish things in a limited time frame.
What’s less fun than the traditional adventure game method of hovering over the whole screen to find the next actionable object?
Doing so under a time limit.
The first half of the game in particular requires a significant amount of trial and error to find what objects relate to each other. You’ll hear similar dialogue over and over again (at least slightly mollified by a fast forward option)
As a result it will sometimes require multiple playthroughs to get one new piece of information. This frustration is exacerbated when you cannot find the exact timing or framing the game wants, especially when the event you’re trying to make happen is late in a given loop. All because you dragged the item slightly too slowly.
On a mechanical level, Twelve Minutes is promising but frustratingly implemented.
On a narrative level, without spoilers, the nicest thing I can say is that the story certainly challenges the audience. It’s definitely here as the main draw for the player, as the simplicity of the mechanics certainly aren’t keeping people’s attention.
But unfortunately that’s it. Because the narrative of 12 Minutes falls apart under close inspection and demands that it’s audience accept an awful lot of contrivance with no supporting structure.
On the next page is a spoiler filled breakdown of exactly what makes Twelve Minutes third act and resolution fall apart, for those who want to understand fully.
If you don’t want to read that, here’s a bunch of places you can not play Twelve Minutes.
Twelve Minutes is published by Annapurna Interactive, and created by Luis Esposito
You can not play Twelve Minutes on Xbox (PC and Console – Including Gamepass) and on Steam
(all Images courtesy of Luis Esposito and Annapurna Interactive)