Twelve Minutes Review

Note: I didn't really want to spoil the game. So hopefully this doesn't have any spoilers. 

So if you're ever wondering, "What do Star Wars, X-Men, and Spider-man all have in common?" You'll be happy to know the answer is not just Disney but also Twelve Minutes. 

Not sure if I am just on an Annapurna Interactive kick or maybe just trying to play less expansive games, but I was very interested to see how this game turned out because of the game's premise. 

First off, this game has some big names in it. Daisy Ridley (from Star Wars fame), James MacAvoy (from X-Men fame), and William Defoe (from many movies, but was pretty spectacular in Spider-man). Disregarding Defoe, it's interesting that both Daisy and James had to mimic American accents despite both being British for their roles. It's an interesting choice and the acting is still top notch, so it's not a distraction. It's just interesting because there are loads of other voice actors and other celebrities they could have chosen from. It doesn't distract from the game's quality in any way.

Secondly, the game's story is semi-rogue lite. Every "wrong" move sends the character back to the beginning. But this is not an RPG or action, it's a narrative driven game. The only thing that carries over from cycle to cycle is the main character's knowledge of what he (not the player) has found out. So each time a cycle repeats, more knowledge is obtained and more dialogue choices can occur based on choices made in the previous cycles. 
A cycle doesn't take more than....you guessed it....Twelve Minutes. 

Twelve Minutes does execute on the narrative fairly well. The puzzle box element is fun to piece together each cycle repeats, learning about why certain events are happening and how to stop them. The plot is interesting, but the written dialogue is so weird sometimes. I felt certain choices led to extreme overreactions from the spouse. Did I mention that there are only three characters in this game? And they have such riveting names as: husband, wife and cop. Nice.

The story also goes off the rails when you get to the end but I think it is a nice touch. The mystery and eerie atmosphere really lends itself to zany conclusions. And while this is a spoiler, the game does have a really weird ending.

There are many faults that I think take away from the effectiveness of the storytelling. One being how repetitive the game gets. In a rogue-lite, repetitiveness is meant to be as a learning tool; failing leads to knowledge of what not to do which feeds into figuring out what to do. In a narrative-driven game, there's not really any need for quick thinking. There were many times when I just accidentally hit skip or the wrong dialogue choice and it required me to restart a cycle.

Twelve Minutes requires several minutes of replaying the same conversations over and over again. Besides the rooms of your apartment, there are no other places to travel to in this game. So there doesn't ever feel like you "progress" since the only thing that is changing are dialogue options. Also the game doesn't give many hints when the puzzle pieces get too difficult to find or put together. So there were times where I went through several dead end cycles with trial and error. There were times where I knew what needed to be done, but couldn't understand how to do something. 

Not to mention there is a time limit in this game. The Twelve Minutes is ever persistent and I guess is supposed to give added pressure to try and solve the puzzles quickly. But it really just adds to the frustration. Any mis-click and or wrong choice just subtracts more time from the clock. Certain events are absolute in timing, so they will always happen after a certain amount of time. So if the husband doesn't do everything in sequence correctly, the cycle starts over. 

It took me about six hours to get to the credits of the game and it's nice there are multiple endings to try and find. I also liked that the developers planned for certain dumb shenanigans. I realized that if I got into the closet quickly, I could skip the whole game and just chill in the closet. Other...more morbid...options could be had and the game would react to it. It's pretty cool.

Twelve Minutes isn't a long game, so I wouldn't recommend buying it. It's not worth the price tag. But it's definitely worth a check if you can find it for free (I played it on Gamepass).