I’m a sucker for mind f**king time loop stories. Groundhog Day, Looper, Palm Springs, that cheap way Doctor Strange saved the world from Dormammu; there’s something about the torture of reliving a moment in time that lends itself to character development in an uncanny way. That was the reason, I was intrigued by Annapurna Interactive’s newest game 12 Minutes in which you’ll have to use the time loop you’re caught in to solve a mystery.
12 Minutes
Developed By: Luis Antonio
Published By: Annapurna Interactive
Available For: Xbox One, X/S, Steam PC
(Review Code Provided By Publisher)
12 Minutes takes your average point-and-click adventure game and layers the mechanics of being stuck in a time loop. You’ll play as a character voiced by James McAvoy, walking in the front door of your apartment at the beginning of the game, where your wife, played by Daisy Ridley, is eager to share some news. She greets you and offers a dessert she made. A few minutes later, though, a cop voiced by Willem Dafoe knocks on the door claiming to have a warrant for your wife’s arrest. From there things get weird.
You’ll need to play through this loop dozens of times to unlock key information in progressing the narrative. It turned this 12 Minute loop into a game that took a few hours to get through. Writer-director Luis Antonio deftly paces the peeling of the story’s layers and it combines with the star-studded cast to create an experience that’s not like anything in gaming. Mostly because in trying to solve this mystery, you can go to some very dark places. Between hiding in a closet to watch your wife get murdered or even being given the option yourself to kill her, this game is for a very mature audience.
On the surface, being confined to the same top-down view of a singular living space gets dry extremely quickly. The animations these characters are limited to are serviceable at best. Most frustrating of all is the trial-and-error you’ll need to do is a level of frustration that hasn’t been seen in gaming for quite some time.
12 Minutes is baffling, not because of the mystery you’ll need to solve as part of a story that would make Christopher Nolan say “That’s weird.” The game somehow drew performances from incredible actors for something that feels at times like a TV pilot AMC passed on. Through its barriers of complexity, there’s something addictive about finding all the possible endings through various butterfly effects that seem like narrative landmines you have to navigate. After playing through to get some of its different endings, I’m not sure if I liked it or if I have Stockholm syndrome, or if I’m just a masochist.
