Twelve Minutes (Xbox One)

A man returns home to his small apartment and sits down to eat dessert with his wife. After a delightful bit of conversation, a knock at the door turns things upside down, a man claiming to be a cop enters and immediately accuses his wife of murdering her own father. In the chaotic confusion, the husband ends up strangled to death… only to find himself suddenly back at his apartment’s entrance, his wife welcoming him home and telling him dessert is ready when he is. This is Twelve Minutes, a game where one man is trapped in a small time loop and trying to find answers and his way out of the small span of time he has to even try and break the cycle.

Twelve Minutes avoids using character names for the most part, titles and nicknames instead being used for its handful of principal characters. The husband, wife, and cop are all fully voiced and by quite a trio of big name celebrities. James McAvoy is the male lead you’ll be playing as, Daisy Ridley his wife, and Willem Dafoe as the antagonistic cop who bursts down the door about five minutes into the loop. For the most part, when the story calls for it, you can expect all of them to bring believable emotion to moments of incredible drama with small subtleties in the ways they hesitate or their intonation, but it’s perhaps not perfect all around. As odd as it may sound, McAvoy doesn’t best portray a man dying by electrocution, unintentional death sometimes the way the loop is reset and McAvoy’s after-revival statements often feeling rather weak. Daisy Ridley can definitely bring the emotion when the story puts the onus on her to carry a scene, but some lines don’t seem to fluidly link to each that might just be a matter of clipping together different takes or struggling to handle the different factors at play in determining what she’ll say. Dafoe’s performance ends up perhaps the most consistent then, since even when he delivers a somewhat stilted line, it’s more for the sake of throwing a clue to the player rather than something the vocal performer had a role in creating.

Twelve Minutes is a story that can swing from mundane to emotionally intense on a dime because of its course of events being designed around deliberate disruption. Whenever the 12 minutes that compromise the time loop is up, you’ll be sent back to the beginning, with earlier resets possible if you do end up meeting a fatal end or attempt to leave the apartment. In fact, leaving the apartment is a nice any time reset if you realize you don’t really have the time to orchestrate events how you want them, but whatever cause there is for the reset, one commonality is that you can’t take anything back to the start with you. You’ll need to pick up any items you intend to use around the apartment again, repeat any interactions, and even hold the same conversations, although you can slightly speed up individual parts and the game helpfully greys out dialogue options that bear no new fruit. Instead, what you’ll want to do to make good use of your time each loop is learn, figuring out how the limited amount of objects in the apartment can be used, talking with your wife to learn vital data, or carrying over helpful information that changes interactions like memorizing phone numbers so you can make calls in the next loop.

The mostly fixed top down perspective on the three rooms that comprise the apartment both help empathize the tiny space the game’s protagonist is trapped in and this search for control with a limited amount of options. The player is almost peering in on this repeating scene, not even getting a good look at the faces of its key characters and asked to guide their fate by interfering with the course of events that will unfold the same way each time otherwise. Inevitably you will need to go through the loop many times, trying new ideas with the small selection of items around the apartment. Closest to a point and click adventure in terms of mechanical design, you’ll need to use some items on others to open up new opportunities and start to progress the plot and making it further along during the strict twelve minute time limit. In some ways it also feels adjacent to an escape room in that everything you need is located in the immediate area, your selection of tools requiring some creative thinking to change fate and start to make headway in the information game at play.

Luckily some things can be done more expediently in subsequent loops, the main character able to fill in his wife on crucial details so she’s up to speed and cooperative, although you still need to account for her emotional state as dumping it on her in the wrong way will upset her. Once you do start to near the bigger reveals the loops become a bit more involved and time sensitive though, and while you can do things like sleep in a bed to nudge time forward a bit or say you’ll wait for the cop with your wife to skip to that point, it is easy to lose track of an action or two or not do it in time and thus need to reset and try again. It can become a little trial-and-error at points with a waiting element as well as you can only test certain options at certain times, but there are still enough little moments of an idea paying off to make it not too frustrating to sometimes hit dead-end puzzles until you remember a certain tool or character action that could change it.

The core mystery of why the man thinks your wife killed her own father is one with enough interesting developments at first to motivate you to keep pushing deeper into the loop and altering its course to uncover more. It isn’t the most compelling murder mystery or all too creative in how things unfold in that part of the story, many important details and revelations more from character exposition than uncovering crucial details yourself, although it was likely straddling a line of believability there since littering the apartment with clues would be a bit odd. However, as more of the story is revealed, it eventually reaches a point where it whams you with a twist that raises many confusing logic questions the game has no good answers for and ends up pulling the remaining focus of the plot towards it. It even seems to forego a possible better resolution or a more believable twist in favor of the kind that demands attention due to its shock factor. It doesn’t come out of left field, but it feels like the centralization on this extreme moment in the story tosses out a lot of the gradual work in favor of dwelling on this specific element. With all the work and waiting through failed loops to experiment culminating in this rough finale that requires you to ignore some simple logic to believe in it, Twelve Minutes goes from a nifty if sometimes bumpy concept into one that can be a little unfulfilling, although thankfully not to such a degree that it completely undoes the better work before the rough landing.

THE VERDICT: Gradually figuring out how to stray from the cycle of Twelve Minutes’s time loop begins as an interesting point and click challenge of using limited resources in your apartment and carrying knowledge between loops to learn more through dialogue. You’re not on a track to solving the most interesting of murder mysteries, but gradually piecing together the details and figuring out new interactions makes it entertaining for a time even with its time-focused play sometimes leading to a little too much waiting or having to retry because your experiments prove fruitless. However, had it stayed on its path, it would have at least been an interesting twist on unraveling a mystery, but the final parts of the game spin off into a shocking twist that rejects logic in parts and focuses too hard on its unusual implications at the detriment to the rest of the experience. Some good performances mean it isn’t a lost cause, but Twelve Minutes pays the price for trying to have an unexpected reveal rather than a clean narrative.

And so, I give Twelve Minutes for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. The issue with Twelve Minutes’s shocking reveal isn’t whether or not it could make for a compelling source of drama, it’s whether or not it has a proper place in the narrative its being sloppily appended to. A few more details could have locked it into the plot a bit better but they’re foregone in favor of a confusing and somewhat rushed finale in a game that otherwise perhaps takes its time too much. It is a shame that this twist ends up defining the game so much as well, because while it had brief moments of frustration if you’re trying to get everything in tight time windows to line up or needing to run through a few actions to see which ones make progress, you are gradually uncovering new reveals and getting to progress the plot in a new direction does provide morsels of interesting story and moments of satisfaction for puzzling out something that did work to your advantage. The small stumbles in the performances of the notable voice cast hardly impacts the moments where they can really drive it home on an emotional moment, but it all being in service of that finale again makes you wish it had chosen either a more standard path or put in the work to really justify that late game swerve. Being able to skip ahead time more simply or through dialogue in big chunks rather than bit by bit would at least alleviate some of the time loop’s problems with having to spend time mulling about to see if you can use an item in a certain way to stop the cop without plopping yourself in the bed since positioning can be an important factor. However, the sloppiness of the twist feels like it needs the polishing most of all. I’ve sometimes derided something I call the “indie game twist” where the plot sloppily jerks in another direction to make for more involved discussion around a small game, and Twelve Minutes probably wanted a whammy to go out on so it’s not a simple murder mystery time loop game, but it compromises a good deal of it plot’s work to get there. There’s enough interesting beforehand that it isn’t doomed and your mileage of course may vary on whether this tanks the experience or the twist alone is shocking enough to get you thinking, but it could have had its dessert and eaten it too if it did take some time to make it work.

Twelve Minutes isn’t the cleanest execution of a time loop story but it has enough interesting moments to it that it can be at least worth a look even with its unsteady finale. Some reveals before the dramatic final one do work well even if they’re on par with soap opera level swerves conceptually, but those are effective sources for drama and piecing together the reveals in your head can start to make for an intriguing narrative that might still survive the odd ending the game drops in your lap afterwards. Twelve Minutes can have its moments where it drags as you try and figure out the next necessary action, but for the most part, the puzzle solving and small character drama found in its loops can still make its overall experience decent enough that it can withstand the toll extracted by some less solid ideas.