Though development on Twelve Minutes started before the pandemic, it's a game that feels entirely of its time. Essentially, it comes down to a guy reliving the worst night of his life over and over and over again, trapped within the confines of a little, three-room apartment. Not only is time repeating, but same with the space by which he's experiencing that time. It's a nightmare scenario that many us can connect with, although maybe not an adequate amount of us, given our current infection rate.
Twelve Minutes brings that nightmare alive poor an interactive thriller in which you need to understand why a guy claiming to be a officer breaks into your house to kill you and your wife-a situation that repeats itself every 12 minutes. But, unlike the stay-at-home reality of the last year and a half, time loop in Twelve Minutes provides the antithesis of imprisonment in the freedom it gives you to have interaction using the small details of your environment and change how each loop plays out.
There's a reason why Groundhog Day is really an unforgettable and influential movie, also it is not only Bill Murray's performance or even the treacly “the secret to life is love after all” message. Really, it is the center of the movie, when Phil Connors realizes that the hell of repeating within 24 hours over and over again also means the freedom to complete whatever you want without consequences. This is the basic philosophy to navigating Twelve Minutes' puzzles, plus they sometimes need you to step outside your comfort zone and perform actions that might at first seem counterintuitive and downright cruel.
Twelve Minutes' gameplay comes down to the classic point-and-click mechanics of old-school adventure games. By interfacing with and combining interactable elements through the apartment, you can start also to manipulate the other characters in the story as well. Or, at points, you can choose not to interact whatsoever and find out how the scene plays out, although it always leads to the same way, until it does not.
As with most adventure games, there is a rhyme and reason towards the items you find. Twelve Minutes doesn't give you full freedom to complete anything you want using the objects you procure. You cannot, for instance, make use of a knife on a painting to chop it of their frame. In the moments when you're attempting to push your character outside the bounds of the items the sport wants you to test out, he will simply shake his head. If you are looking to have the ability to, say, splash water on the malfunctioning light switch, think again. In that way, Twelve Minutes gives you the illusion of freedom, while having the perfect amount of direction to help keep you moving forward in your mission to solve the mystery and save your valuable wife and yourself. After i reached the end, I had been pleased with all the steps I took to get there.
Given the actual and limited scope of the game's playable area and narrative, it is a bit jarring to determine it so jam-packed with bankable talent. During Twelve Minutes' cinematic opening credits, what they are called James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe stick out like sore thumbs. However, whenever you actually meet the characters they're playing, it's hard not to ponder whether their casting only agreed to be a stunt-or, if “stunt” is simply too strong a word, a minimum of a way to garner more attention for an indie game that may have otherwise flown individually distinct.
To his credit, Dafoe's growly, threatening performance makes his contribution towards the story unmistakable. But McAvoy and Ridley placed on American accents which are distracting and completely mask who they really are. It feels strange to incorporate big Hollywood names inside a game when you can't see their faces or hear their natural voices, and also the performances do feel a bit flat. A part of that may be in the delivery, even though there are moments where they perform the melodrama as well as they are able to. A bigger concern is that McAvoy and Ridley just don't appear up to the task of selling Twelve Minutes' hamfisted dialogue, particularly when the story wades into some incredibly dark territory. You can't really say whether more seasoned voice actors might have done more with what is at times a sloppy script, and perhaps it can't have separated itself a lot if the actors playing them weren't big Hollywood stars. But their performances definitely didn't save certain moments from feeling cheesy and unsympathetic.
Fortunately, the performances and questionable dialogue aren't a lot of distractions regarding take away from Twelve Minutes' twisting and turning plot. Given that everything happens within a cyclical 12-minute span, the storyline isn't a lot by what happens next as it's by what you discover next. Considering that the story is meted out depending on how clever the gamer is, it's commendable how well-paced these moments of discovery are throughout the game.
What's also notable would be the type of dicey ethical questions about which the game pivots. Who're you actually hurting when you kill a family member understanding that they will come back to life in 12 minutes with no memory of the murder? If your truth known only to you will ruin your life but save another, could it be your responsibility to let it?
However, by the end, Twelve Minutes does begin to lose itself a bit in all its twists and turns. While the ending is as disturbed as you may expect so that it is, given its opening moments, a number of its more logical questions are thrown out the window like garbage along the side of a freeway. The questions of why your character is experiencing this time loop and why he doesn't remember certain things about his past are never resolved. If you don't consider it way too hard, Twelve Minutes will summary nicely. But dwell on the unanswered questions the story proposes and it'll end up feeling just slightly undercooked.
Twelve Minutes does exactly what it sets out to do, that is create a deeply tense thriller having a time loop mechanic. But it does another thing, that is showing that even indie games might have the type of envy of Hollywood that may poison triple-A games. There's a whiff of auteurship in the game's creator, Luis Antonio, also listed as its “developer,” and what feels like a stunt in the A-list casting. I'd be going too much basically asserted Twelve Minutes feels pretentious, since it doesn't, a minimum of not in the manner that games like The Last people Part II, with its $100 million budget and fawning articles with headlines calling it “the summer's best movie,” do. It seems just slightly insecure by what it actually does best, that is provide an intricate and satisfying puzzle game with a lot of twists and turns. Sometimes, that's all a game must create an artful experience.
