Twelve Minutes [PlayStation 5] | REVIEW

Twelve Minutes is one of those games that people will either really enjoy or find themselves frustratingly bored by. The core concept of re-living a twelve-minute loop over and over again until you find the exact way to break out of it is certainly one that won’t appeal to everyone after all, and it’s easy to find the repetitive nature somewhat monotonous over time. Despite this… I loved it. Sure, there were times when I was stumped and annoyed that I didn’t know how to make the smallest bit of progress, but I also found myself completely hooked in from start to end.

Check out a gallery of screenshots down below:

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The narrative of Twelve Minutes is the most important aspect of the game, so I’ll make sure not to head into spoiler territory in this review. It tells the story of a husband and wife, who are seemingly having an ordinary night after the husband comes home from work. Or they would be, if a police officer didn’t burst into the room in order to arrest the wife for murder. Shocker, right? Taking on the role of the doting husband, you try to defend your wife and protect her from these accusations, which sees events take a violent turn as the police officer chokes you out until you die. Game over.

Or at least it would be, if you weren’t stuck in a twelve-minute time loop. See, death doesn’t mean the end, but instead starts the evening all over again from the moment you stepped into your apartment and were welcomed home by your wife. With prior knowledge of what happened in mind, it’s up to you to find a way to stop these bad events from occurring, with each failure seeing the time-loop reset and starting the twelve-minutes all over again. It’s kinda like Groundhog Day, except it doesn’t star Bill Murray (and there are certainly no groundhogs).

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a star cast on board though, with James McAvoy starring as the husband, Daisy Ridley as the wife, and Willem Dafoe as the police officer. Each does a perfect job of portraying their character, with a believable sense of emotion found between them all; you’ll believe the love that the wife has for her husband, you’ll believe his confusion as he finds himself in a time loop, and you’ll believe the anger that comes from the police officer. It helps make the narrative all the more easier to invest in and really helps establish Twelve Minutes as a unique cinematic experience.

“Whilst you’re in a fixed twelve-minute loop, you can disrupt it in a multitude of ways, with the characters involved in the passage of time responding to your actions and reacting accordingly.”

Everything plays from a top-down perspective, giving players the full layout of each room of the apartment. Not that it’s a particularly big apartment mind, with the whole game only seeing you explore the living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a small closet. It’s definitely one of the more confined video games that you’ll play.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty for the player to do though. Twelve Minutes embraces a point-and-click adventure style of play where you can interact with different items in varied ways, with plenty of room for trial-and-error and outright experimentation as you try to figure out what is important for any given moment. And believe me, you’ll be surprised at just what you can do with these items, with the player given a lot of control as to how they can approach each situation. Whilst you’re in a fixed twelve-minute loop, you can disrupt it in a multitude of ways, with the characters involved in the passage of time responding to your actions and reacting accordingly. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but you can do some surprising (and somewhat grim) things with the objects around you… it’s all part of the process of trying to unravel the time loop and adds a brilliant sense of interactivity where the littlest of actions from the player really can affect the story. The freedom it offers was one of my favourite things about the entire game and I became obsessed with seeing every different thing I could possibly do, even IF it can be a little bit guilty of making you play by its own rules in some scenarios.

Whilst there’s plenty of fun to be had experimenting and seeing what you can do, there’s also a puzzle-like element in place where you have to try and figure out the exact course of action that you need to follow to progress. This is where Twelve Minutes can get a little repetitive, especially since you’ll often have to re-play the same sections over and over again as you try to figure things out. It’s not that the puzzles are bad in any way, but rather that failing to solve them in the allotted time means starting the process all over again. There are no real checkpoints here, but instead the same twelve-minutes that you have to work through over and over again as you try to work out where you went wrong the last time and attempt to fix it.

“The freedom to utilise everything around you, the way the characters and world respond to your actions, the emphasis on experimentation with puzzle-solving, and the gripping twists-and-turns of the plot; everything about the game completely resonated with me and kept me absorbed into the experience as I went through just about every conclusion it had to offer.”

Thankfully, the short time frame you’re given to work with means that it never grows too frustrating as you repeat some of the same actions again, whilst there were only a few occasions where I was completely stumped and unsure what to do. The small space you’ve got to work with means that you don’t have to go scouring across massive areas looking for that one little item you might have missed, whilst everything also becomes more streamlined the longer you play and the more you learn. Hearing repeated dialogue over and over isn’t great, sure, but knowing exactly what you need to do to return to previously reached points and then approaching it in a whole new way can feel pretty satisfying.

Twelve Minutes is just so unique, and I know I’ve never played anything quite like it before. The freedom to utilise everything around you, the way the characters and world respond to your actions, the emphasis on experimentation with puzzle-solving, and the gripping twists-and-turns of the plot; everything about the game completely resonated with me and kept me absorbed into the experience as I went through just about every conclusion it had to offer. I managed to beat the game in around five hours or so, but those were five hours that left me in awe of the interactive storytelling (even if I did have to see a lot of the same scenes over and over again).

Developer: Luis Antonio
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Platform(s): PlayStation 5 (Reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
Website: https://twelveminutesgame.com/