Synopsis:
An interactive thriller about a man trapped in a time loop. Featuring James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe.

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Reviewed on: PC (Ryzen 5 2600, RTX 2070 Super, 32GB DDR4)
Also available for: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Cast: James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, William Dafoe

Developer: Luis Antonio
Writers: Luis Antonio, Steven Lerner
Character Art: Mashru Mishu, Alexei Murzak, Matthew Kean
Environment Art: James Stout, Pablo Forsolloza, Carlos Vilela, Samuel Kambey, Nejamin Duk, Jonathan Nascone

A husband arrives home to his small apartment; his wife awaits him inside with news and a surprise. Look in the fridge; she’s baked two deserts and awaiting hidden in the top of a drawer in the bedroom, a present for the man that could change their lives. Candlelight dinner follows with a slow dance, something the married couple haven’t done in some time. A knock on the door interrupts their special evening, bringing a police officer into their house. He claims the wife murdered her father eight years ago, and she’s hiding his expensive watch. The husband struggles and attempts to fight off the rough policeman, which ends with him getting the life choked out of him in the middle of the kitchen—but the man awakens, standing in the kitchen again, just minutes before this whole event began.

Twelve Minutes takes the Groundhog Day time loop and wraps it up inside a crime thriller and an interactive point-and-click game. Controlling the husband, you’re stuck inside a loop that doesn’t allow you to leave the apartment or to surpass twelve minutes either. Death brings you back to the start of the evening, as does waiting for the twelve minutes to tick past.

At the heart of Twelve Minutes is a complicated puzzle game that doesn’t hold your hand. From the moment you enter the apartment until you roll credits, the player is given zero hints about what to do next or how to escape the loop. At one stage, so lost, I considered if there was no end and if that was the game’s meta-narrative. I can, however, confirm, there is an end credits sequence.

The bone you’re thrown in the opening minutes and your first loop is the same question you’ll be asking over your playthrough for the next 6-10 hours. “Where is this watch? And why is your wife hiding it from you?”

Asking the wife head-on about the watch or the death of her father doesn’t end well. But through trial and error, new information is revealed, and slowly you can open new conversation choices and moments. For the most part, you’re free to reach the solutions or try out things as you see fit. This includes stabbing your wife and leaving her dead body on the floor for the policeman to find or flushing the watch down the toilet once you find its location, just to hear the husband let out a burst of slightly psychotic laughter.

What keeps the loop engaging are the performances of James McAvoy as the husband, Daisy Ridley as the wife and William Dafoe as the police officer. Twelve Minutes without voice acting would have not been engaging enough, while subpar voice acting would have grated after several hours. McAvoy and Ridley are raw and honest, bringing the romance and the brutality of the moments to life. In contrast, Dafoe brings an everyman aspect to the police officer that stops him from becoming disregarded and simply the villain. However, the animation of the characters can be distracting quite often and at times ruin a scene. I’ve seen the husband walk through the wife as she was being arrested, the police office tread all over the wife’s dead body, and the wife clip through the bathroom door a couple of times as she was leaving. Pair these on top of the generally stuttery nature that comes with the point-and-click design, and all together, it can bring down what is otherwise a very cinematic game.

Twelve Minutes goes in some very dark and unexpected directions that I couldn’t have seen coming. My desire to know how the story wrapped up had me looping scenarios over and over into the early hours of the morning. However, the ending isn’t as strong as the journey and I wasn’t as invested in the last third due to the direction it took with the characters and the narrative. Twelve Minutes ends up going for shock value and loses the small character moments and choices that made it so engaging. But pulling my hair out to solve the apartments puzzles was reward enough for me to want to see the loop closed.

(Twelve Minutes code provided for review)