The playful premise surrounding Twelve Minutes is engrossing and some familiar voices helps to sweeten the experimental design. The new indie title published by Annapurna Interactive recently introduced some star power, ramping up the stakes for the creative but modest scope of its concept. Adventure game fans intrigued by experimentation, mystery, and the presented combination of Groundhog Day and psych-thriller should be excited for Twelve Minutes' long-delayed release on the horizon.
The Twelve Minutes premise is simple. The player takes on the role of a husband returning home for a quiet dinner with their wife. The two live in a modest one-bedroom apartment and seem happy together during a typically calm evening like any other, except this one is soon interrupted by an authoritative knock on the door. A voice claims to be the police before an imposing thug barges in to arrest the wife for murder, yet something about the whole situation is decidedly not above board. Fighting back, the husband is quickly dispatched before instantly traveling back in time and re-entering their apartment, the clock wound back with everything as it once was.
The magical hook here is the fact that the husband re everything that just played out. Every move made by his wife and the assailant is primed to occur as before, and Twelve Minutes' time loop drama will continue forward, albeit interruptable at virtually any time by choosing different dialogue options and manipulating the various items in the apartment. Interestingly, because the husband’s knowledge is the only thing that evolves over each loop, conversations with his wife quickly spider outward, presenting new information across multiple loops.
Director and developer Luís António has worked on Twelve Minutes for years now, with the game ing through several iterations during that time. The most significant might be the addition of a head-turning trio of Hollywood voice talent in this build, with James McAvoy, Daisey Ridley, and Willem Dafoe playing the roles of husband, wife, and intruder, respectively. That being said, there is a slight but unmistakable disted quality to a lot of the line reads, which also seems par for the course the game is attempting to navigate. This means that dialogue delivery sometimes rubs awkwardly against the strict timing necessary for the narrative, which made some scenes in the preview feel a little stiff.
The actual gameplay is considerably minimal as well. Screenshots of the game make it seem like free-range movement and positioning is key, and it might be, but the entire Twelve Minutes experience purely relies on simple cursor positioning, with a single left click the primary mode of interaction. Items can be picked up and placed into a top-loaded item drawer menu straight out of point-and-click adventure games of yore - António counts himself a devotee of classic LucasArts adventures - and many of the interactions seemed to hinge on a correct item being used at a correct time.
Luckily, the possibility space appears much larger than the apartment's size implies. A knife casually left on a counter can be tucked away and used to free the husband from the intruder’s riot cuffs, but Dafoe’s character is more physically capable than either the husband or wife, so a direct face-off predictably ends in the intruder’s favor. And Twelve Minutes begins anew.
As an adventure game, Twelve Minutes is keenly focused on a system of planning and executing said plans to make progress, inch by perilous inch. The design doesn't feature a hundred items in the living room to inspect and tinker with to try and figure out what’s useful. No, António is insistent that, over many iterations of development, every little detail and item here has some sort of viable meaning and application.
For example, walking into the bedroom prompts a sudden electric spark, and the husband and wife casually discuss the failing light switch as yet another thing the landlord hasn’t fixed yet. On a later loop in Twelve Minutes, the protagonist can position his sleeping wife in the bed and hide in the bathroom, waiting for the intruder to break in on his own. He could be heard investigating the apartment after no one answered the door, then walked into the bedroom. A sizzling sound and a yelp ed his attempt to flick the light switch, which momentarily shocked him.
Close to the previous estimates made along Annapurna Interactive’s Outer Wilds may be the most appropriate reference, only with the scale adjusted from an entire solar system to a few tiny rooms, with the intimate violence here a darker counterpoint.
That’s helped along by Twelve Minutes’ precise and gloomy visual aesthetic, one which can be compared to the work of Stanley Kubrick. Wonderful touches like the rain misting and trailing down the kitchenette window and the smudges on the shower tile help the apartment feel more like a home and less like a level to explore. The soundtrack adds to the cinematic feel as well, and the startling foley work accompanying virtually every action seems purposefully crafted to immerse the player in this microcosm.
Twelve Minutes is exciting and even occasionally funny; attempting to dial 911 on a cell phone found in the closet prompted a dispatcher to inform us that the police could be there in 15 minutes, rendering this potential Hail Mary play utterly hopeless to the situation. It’s also the kind of game which could explode on streaming platforms and Let’s Plays, and a crowd urgently voting on different decisions could make for another great way to experience Luís António’s creation when it becomes available later this year.
Twelve Minutes releases later this year on Xbox One and PC/Windows.