• Log In | Sign Up

  • News
  • Reviews
  • Top Games
  • Search
  • New Releases
  • Daily Deals
  • Forums

Review for Twelve Minutes

Twelve Minutes review
Twelve Minutes review

Time travel adventures often conjure up grand visions of epic quests through history’s most memorable milestones; of rubbing shoulders with the most notable personalities of the past; of braving temporal paradoxes to save the world from otherwise inevitable disaster. Then there are the smaller time-looping interpersonal dramas, Groundhog Day-style, such as a man reliving the same one-fifth of an hour in his tiny one-bedroom apartment while his wife is accused by a cop of murdering her father eight years earlier. Luis Antonio’s Twelve Minutes is essentially a single puzzle sequence, extended and fleshed out to a full four-hour indie adventure. Trying to find a way to bring this dreadful repeating night to a positive conclusion is a tantalizing premise, but some unclear progression requirements and the unavoidable duplication inherent in this type of game can quickly pepper an otherwise tasty gaming stew with exhaustion.

It all starts as you arrive home after work one night. Your inner-city flat is quiet and dark apart from the occasional headlights of passing cars and a bar of light visible beneath the bathroom door where your wife can be heard humming to herself. It’s destined to be an eventful night, as you’ll soon find out, with both good and bad in store. Your wife, apparently in high spirits, has made a special treat for the two of you to share, and the game gives players enough freedom and very little guidance to pursue whatever seems natural. You can set the table and have dessert to find out what’s got your wife feeling so happy; conversely, you can just sit on the couch and chat, or set some mood lighting and music and share a lovely slow dance together. It’s nice to have these few minutes of serenity, because the domestic bliss is about to be shattered.

It takes only five minutes for things to go off the rails. (The game passes in real time, and pressing the Escape key at any time brings up a clock to help keep track of how much has elapsed.) Suddenly a visitor at the door disturbs the peace, claiming to be a cop with a warrant for your wife’s arrest. As he barges into the apartment and immediately begins to physically restrain the two of you, handcuffing you both with zip ties and roughly throwing you to the floor, he demands the whereabouts of a watch your wife supposedly took that would prove her guilty of murder all those years ago. Eventually, through her desperate denials, the cop loses his patience and attempts to make her talk by strangling you. Unable to defend yourself, your life and consciousness both fade away.

That’s no spoiler, of course, as in the next moment you find yourself standing inside the door to your apartment again, the inner-city flat once more quiet and dark apart from the occasional headlights of passing cars and a bar of light visible beneath the bathroom door where your wife can be heard humming to herself. It sounds crazy, but it seems time has rewound to the beginning of the evening, a mere handful of minutes earlier. From here on out, events continue to occur in a constant loop, the only deviations caused by you as you slowly piece things together and attempt to influence the evening’s outcome. But there is no way to sidestep what’s coming: if you get killed or knocked out, or try to leave the apartment, the cycle resets and you’re transported back to the beginning immediately, presumably until you’ve resolved whatever issue you’re here to deal with. You can pick up household items lying around – a kitchen knife, a spoon, some sleeping pills – but even your inventory is emptied during a time reset, and if you need an object again you have to reacquire it each time.

Naturally, this leads to a fair amount of trial and error. Nobody other than you keeps their memories from one cycle to the next, and other than dealing with the immediate threat of the cop who’ll be at your door any minute, it’s not even clear what you’re meant to accomplish. You’ll spend a sizable chunk of the game’s runtime attempting varied approaches to dealing with the situation. You can call for help, try to ambush the cop, let things run their course while hiding in the closet, or simply go to sleep; you name it, there’s plenty of freedom available to play with different possibilities.

At first I was impressed by how intuitively the game handled my blind fumbling in the dark. After learning of the threat, my first instinct the next time around was to warn my wife not to answer the door, and – sure enough – a new dialogue option appeared when I spoke to her to do just that. However, there are also moments when a clear path forward is blocked off for unintuitive reasons: thinking I’d found evidence to prove my wife’s innocence, the next loop still failed simply because I thought it would be enough to point it out to the cop rather than pick it up ahead of time so I could physically hand it to him.

Thankfully, as your experiences and memories of the evening begin to pile up, you’ll find ways to cut through doing the same actions over and over. Deciding to let your wife in on what you’ve discovered and what’s about to happen, for example, understandably results in an angry and frightened outburst from her that can end the night prematurely. Over time, however, as you keep digging for more information, new dialogue options open up that allow you to avoid previous pitfalls. Phone numbers discovered late in the evening are available right from the get-go in the next loop, for example, and you’ll begin to anticipate the timing of certain events to influence them in your favor.

After a few hours of experimenting, it becomes clear that regardless of how much agency you seem to have, there is a very specific order of events that must take place in order for the night’s conflicts to be resolved. Whenever you think you may have a winning strategy figured out, fate snatches certain victory out of your grasp, and you have to start all over again. Of course, this is by design and it’s intriguing to watch the protagonist’s growing desperation every time the ordeal resets anew. It continually reinforces the stakes to watch his life be shattered right in front of his very eyes.

It’s actually impressive how many different approaches to the night’s events have been anticipated, including some pretty drastic ones. But as the time loops multiply, it becomes easier to share the husband’s frustration at getting kicked back to the start every time you seem to be on the verge of reaching a conclusion. And though the process itself is generally a rewarding one, the final act stumbles a bit. There’s a particularly unsavory end-game revelation. Credit to the developer for going in a wholly unexpected (and difficult-to-digest) direction, but this last reveal throws the kind of curveball that casts the events of the evening in a whole new light, culminating in a somewhat cryptic, unsatisfying finale.

Considering the sparse number of locations and characters, the presentation is targeted on the areas of greatest impact. The studio apartment (living room, coat closet, bedroom and bathroom) is shown from a top-down perspective, with some rather spartan furnishings befitting a struggling couple just managing to get by in the big city. Character models look basic but workable; luxuries like lip-synced dialogue are entirely absent, but noticeable effort has gone into adding animations for them interacting with each other. Small flourishes that make the apartment feel real are abundant, like the uneven way the paint on the walls has dried after being rolled on, while raindrops spatter on the windows and lightning flashes momentarily illuminate the space as a storm approaches, and a tinge of red creeps in through the windows as the evening wears on.

The game begins with several familiar names proudly displayed in its opening credits, listing the voices of our three main characters. First and foremost is the unmistakable timbre of Willem Dafoe as the antagonist cop, who is able to drip with menace seemingly effortlessly. Star Wars fans should recognize Daisy Ridley as the wife whose world is about to crash around her, and she too does well with the large amount of emotional drama required of her. James McAvoy, as the player character, sounded to me less instantly recognizable and more like the everyman character he portrays. Not surprisingly for such accomplished actors, the voice-overs of husband and wife effortlessly sell the tenderness of a loving couple, while smoothly transitioning into the tension and terror that inevitably come from having their lives turned upside down by an intruder. The music fits the circumstances well without particularly standing out, largely opting for atmospheric backing tracks that let the vocal performances deservedly steal the spotlight, and serving primarily to ramp up tension when it’s needed most.

As uneven as the experience can be, ultimately Twelve Minutes succeeds more often than not, and its misses are mainly inherent to any narrative-focused time-loop adventure. The constant repetition, particularly with the extremely short loop duration, and that feeling of finally running out of ideas and being stuck after you’ve tried a dozen variations on the same concept are hard to ignore, and the reward for all your trouble is an ending that won’t be to everyone’s taste. Accept those things as inevitable, however, and there are also many positives to appreciate. The clueless but emotionally distraught time traveler setup is certainly intriguing, particularly given the very personal and tangible stakes; there’s enough flexibility in the gameplay that it will take many go-arounds to exhaust every available possibility; and it’s all bolstered by acclaimed Hollywood voice talent bringing the drama to life. It’s not destined to be a timeless classic, but Twelve Minutes is compelling enough to fill an evening or two with plenty more staying power than its name suggests.

WHERE CAN I DOWNLOAD Twelve Minutes

Twelve Minutes is available at:

We get a small commission from any game you buy through these links (except Steam).

Our Verdict:

In cramming a time-looping murder mystery into the confines of a small inner-city studio apartment, Twelve Minutes offers much to appreciate, though the execution suffers somewhat from the limitations such a premise inevitably brings with it.

GAME INFO Twelve Minutes is an adventure game by Luis Antonio released in 2021 for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. It has a Stylized art style, presented in 2D or 2.5D and is played in a Third-Person perspective.

The Good:

  • Many gameplay possibilities to experiment with
  • Dafoe, Ridley and McAvoy deliver emotionally powerful performances
  • An intimate, personal twist on the time-travel trope

The Bad:

  • No guidance on what your actual objective truly is
  • Repetition sets in as ideas run low
  • Ending is far less satisfying than what leads up to it

The Good:

  • Many gameplay possibilities to experiment with
  • Dafoe, Ridley and McAvoy deliver emotionally powerful performances
  • An intimate, personal twist on the time-travel trope

The Bad:

  • No guidance on what your actual objective truly is
  • Repetition sets in as ideas run low
  • Ending is far less satisfying than what leads up to it
continue reading below
continue reading below

Adventure Gamers Community

Community reviews for more Adventure Games  (randomly selected)

review
Back to the top