The time loop structure has become a de rigueur gaming gimmick, but never has one been deployed to such unpleasant and misanthropic ends as Twelve Minutes. If there’s a point to Luis Antonio’s game, it’s that humans are sinful and perpetually driven to violent behavior, and actualization and forgiveness come with a body count.
A man (voiced by James McAvoy) comes home after work to his wife (Daisy Ridley), who has prepared a fancy dessert and is ready to drop the bombshell that she’s pregnant. After a few minutes, though, a cop (Willem Dafoe) bursts through the door, handcuffs them both, and violently interrogates them about a missing watch belonging to the woman’s dead father. After taking a brutal beating, the man wakes up, 12 minutes prior, to the second he walked through the door. Thus, a 12-minute time loop begins, and the man has a mystery to solve.
From there, Twelve Minutes feels like Something Awful copypasta wearing the skin of an Ibsen play. The top-down perspective, the minimalist art direction, and the voyeuristic approach to violence would be sharp, effective tools in hands more dedicated to the story’s interpersonal drama. It’s hard to tell, though, whether that’s really so difficult for some developers to execute under the strict auspices of a point-and-click adventure, or if it’s just traditional adventure game design being at war with good writing, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Twelve Minutes is passable enough as a point-and-click adventure, save for one astoundingly awful puzzle solution that leads into the climax. You wander the husband and wife’s apartment and collect seemingly meaningless items, combining them in ways that illustrate the game’s propensity toward overcomplicating simple tasks and tossing logic out the window.
That lack of logic is to be expected, at least from a mechanical standpoint, in a genre that has always had a problem tying interplay between characters to its puzzle solving, and that’s in stories playing in far more cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek scenarios than the one Twelve Minutes presents. This is a game that builds its premise on terse, suspenseful conversations where a husband and wife are forced to break down the lies their marriage is built on, or finding ways to reason with a seemingly unreasonable third party.
Say what you will about David Cage—and there’s certainly plenty to say—but at least Quantic Dream’s methods of building scenes around branching, interactive conversations have gotten to a point where something resembling nuance is possible, as shown by Detroit: Become Human. Conversations exist in his games to deepen what we know about the characters. By contrast, the conversations in Twelve Minutes are all in service of puzzle-solving, and whatever tension the game might gain from two adults being forced to question their marriage over and over again, there’s not nearly enough of it here to give the story gravity.
Not for one second does the husband, wife, or cop feel like fully realized people in Twelve Minutes, and that somehow makes the game’s distressing, eerily intimate violence feel even more disquieting. A little bit of justification for the horrible dissonance of the characters feeling so unhuman is provided to players in the end, but it’s a long road getting there, and even the most generous take on Twelve Minutes catches an absolute beating from its final twist, a plot point so abysmally mishandled in nearly every conceivable way that it would’ve demolished the game even if the script had a top-to-bottom rewrite by David Mamet.
The fallout of that ending makes what had been a wafer-thin murder mystery with a gimmick into an exercise in psychological sadism, where the player is nauseatingly complicit. Despite the immense pool of talent giving their all to breathe life into these characters, Twelve Minutes is a game thoroughly lacking in humanity, in any sense of the word.
The game was reviewed using a code provided by fortyseven communications on August 19.
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