2021 is definitely the year of the time loop. Lots of games, a few films and TV shows all showcase the mechanic this year and one of the ones that I was personally looking forward to was Twelve Minutes, the new game from developer Luis Antonio and publisher AnnaPurna Interactive. I then, unfortunately, played the game.
Twelve Minutes is a game with a striking look, with a top down perspective set in the smallest apartment known to man and features just three characters, the Protagonist, his wife and a mysterious cop. What starts out as the, quote “best night ever” quickly deteriorates as the cop bursts in, accuses the wife of murder and eventually kills you.
The loop resets, and its time to figure out why he shows up, why he accuses your wife of murder and exactly what he is wanting. In terms of mechanics, it is a fairly standard point and click style game with objects that can be interacted with and combined with various others and the three characters to create differing results and hopefully get to the truth of the matter. The problem is that there are enough things to interact with and logic to follow that the possibility space becomes way, way larger than what the game actually wants you to do.
Que many hours of frustration as you constantly bump up against what you think you can do, and what you can actually do. Your brain will say that, logically, doing this with that will result in this, but what actually happens is you just receive the same bit of dialog again over and over until you finally fumble into the right interaction and move the story forward. This game is supposed to be about six hours long, but because of this problem with possibility, it took me ten.
Some of this is down the UI, that can make it difficult to realise you need to do something else with an object or click a dialog option more times to get different results. I finally beat the game once I realised I had to click on an object I just picked up to trigger some dialog that will grant me a different path of conversation when talking to the wife and it says a lot that at that point I was looking up guides that said just pick up the object, not pick it up and click on it, almost like even they didn’t realise you had to do that.
Twelve Minutes suffers from something that just about all time loop games suffer from: repeat dialog. Now, it might seem harsh to criticize a game with such a system for having to get the same dialog to the player over and over but with the other issues it out stays its welcome long before you can complete the game.
It’s not all bad however. The all star cast does a stellar job with a script that isn’t exactly stunning and I honestly, without being told it was, couldn’t tell that the protagonist is played by James McAvoy and his wife by Daisy Ridley. I can tell the cop is Willam Dafoe, cause it's Willam Defoe, hiding that iconic voice is almost impossible!
The script just doesn’t make sense at times, with reactions and dialog which can instantly throw you out of the game because frankly, people just don’t interact like that. It’s partially the nature of getting dialog recorded in different sessions, sometimes thousands of miles apart, to work together properly, but also the script just does a bad job of those interactions. It does go some places in terms of the plot though, and some are pretty wild, eliciting an out loud “WTF?” from me personally, but it definitely has its problems.
Twelve Minutes unfortunately isn’t as good a game as its premise might suggest. The issues with the possibility space and a script that could have been so much better bring down what was an arresting idea, one that could have stuck with people for more than just the bad areas. As it stands, if you do remember this game, it will be mainly because of the extreme levels of frustration it provided. Fans of the genre will get the most of it, the rest of us beware.