Getting stuck in a narrative time loop game is a unique kind of hell. On the one hand, being stuck creates a link between mechanics, story, and player engagement that is seldom possible in video games; like your protagonist you are trapped, both trapped in an endless cycle that you cannot break. On the other hand, the experience can be frustrating if all you want is a little bit of progress. So goes Twelve Minutes, a fascinating game that unravels its story for 12 minutes at a time.
The start of Twelve Minutes is instantly captivating. Once at home in your small apartment, your wife has prepared your favorite dessert. It’s a special night because when you sit down to eat, she reveals that she is pregnant. You are going to be a father. But then there is a knock at the door. A man who claims to be a police officer accuses your wife of murdering her father eight years ago. He says he’s looking for her father’s pocket watch. She insists she didn’t, but the cop wrestles you both to the ground. In an act of extreme police brutality, he begins to choke you, but at the moment of death you wake up at your front door just minutes earlier. The evening repeats itself over and over again. What are you doing next
Twelve Minutes is a point-and-click adventure game, and so point and click your way around the three-room apartment to convince your wife of the time warp, stop the cop from killing you, and solve the mystery of your front door. Solid writing and great performances from James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe carried the game through its roughly six-hour runtime. Dafoe in particular plays an excellent and creepy villain who is both deadly and aggressive, adding to your sense of urgency in every loop.
Progress depends on memorization and experimentation. Memorization works better in the long run. If you remember the location of each key element in the apartment and the core questions that need to be answered, you can make solid progress with each iteration and discover new revelations as you better solve the puzzle. Mechanically, however, the game never goes as far as I wanted it to. My hair-raising plans and experiments – such as trying to pour a glass of water on the wooden floor in the front door to trip the cop – were not recognized by the game. For every puzzle there are very precise solutions, e.g. B. Show this photo to this character, and only then can you unlock the required dialog tree. The game expects you to find these solutions exactly the way you want them to, which can feel limiting when you experiment with the environment.
In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing, but when you get stuck you feel trapped in your own time warp. Each run through the game takes a little over 10 minutes, which feels like a tough time constraint if you can’t decipher your next move. The time limit can be frustrating and the repetitive dialogue each cycle becomes very tedious. At one point, I spent over an hour looping through the loop, desperately trying to find what I had overlooked. Every time I tried to be creative with the game, nothing I did gave me any progress. The whole process was annoying.
Twelve Minutes is ambitious, both in its narrative and in its gameplay. It limits players to its brutal rules and its tragedies really appalled me. And while the gameplay never let me experiment as much as I wanted – I still wish my cup of water plan had worked – I can’t stop thinking about the experience. I no longer want to be trapped in the game’s time warp, but the whole adventure will be with me. Twelve Minutes is a case study of a game that thinks outside the box, plays by its own rules, and for that alone it’s a rewarding experience.
