TWELVE MINUTES
A GAME ABOUT BEING STUCK IN A TIME LOOP
IN AN APARTMENT
AND BEING KILLED BY A BALD WILLEM DAFOE
This is a review. Of sorts. It contains major spoilers for the game ‘Twelve Minutes’. While I do more or less provide all the details to where you'll probably understand the main points and the story beats even without playing it, do check out the Steam Page first and see if it's something you might wanna check out for yourself.
Tick.
I’d first gotten wind of Luis Antonio’s ‘Twelve Minutes’ in 2019, when a trailer for it was shown off at that year’s E3. The premise was relatively simple, but undeniably intriguing – you are placed in an apartment and forced to live through the same twelve minutes over and over again, in an attempt to save yourself and your wife from an intruder that breaks in and seemingly probably murders both of you.
The game had, by that point, actually been in development for about four years. What had first started as a one-man endeavor eventually turned into an effort of a five-person team. The game went from having the simple placeholder art it had when it was first shown off all the way back in 2015 to a detailed and moody apartment, character models with full-on motion capture and, of course, the voice acting you’d need to have the complete cinematic experience the game was very obviously striving for.
We are still, however, in 2019. And by this point, the three main characters still hadn’t been given the voices of James McAvoy, or Daisy Ridley or Willem Dafoe – the star cast that would turn into such a major selling point for the game.
I was already sold on the game, though. I like time loop stories. And it was very rare to actually see a gameplay loop actually built around it. There was a reason why you’d avoid it as a developer – the whole fun of a time loop system lies in cause and effect. The player will inevitably try loads and loads of different things to affect the outcome, increasing the number of potential variables the developer has to take into account, increasing the scope, increasing the budget, increasing—
Well, actually, once the budget gets too high, the mountain or reasons usually stops, doesn’t it?
Still, I wasn’t too skeptical. There was a reason why the game took place in an apartment.
What’s the opposite expression of ‘wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle’? It felt like it was going to be the opposite of that.
Tock.
The year is 2021. The game gets unlocked on Steam, and me and my girlfriend sit down to play it.
The opening sequence of the game is you, the protagonist, returning home from work. The game has you move from the elevator, down a hallway, to your apartment door, showing off the point-and-click mechanics. The carpet of the hallway is the same pattern from Kubrick’s ‘Shining’.
You enter the apartment. You find that it’s actually pretty small. The first room you find yourself in is a living room/dining room/kitchen mash-up. To your left is a small walk-in closet. A little further up is the door to the bedroom. The only other door is the one to the bathroom.
‘There is no TV’, you consider.
But there’s no time for your doubts. That last door – the bathroom door – opens, and out comes your wife. She gives you a kiss. She tells you she’s made dessert.
‘Let me know when you’re ready for it’, she says, effectively signaling you that you can now do whatever your heart desires.
Tick.
It is about a week since the game’s release. The overall reception can be described as polarizing.
While the voice acting, the concept and the implementation of the time loop mechanic are generally praised, all discussion of the game eventually converges on two points of fault:
- The game’s last twist and overall conclusion is, to say the least, completely ridiculous. Bad foreshadowing, bad delivery, bad payoff, and overall nonsensical when placed in the context of the story’s implied timeline.
- While repetition is the bread and butter of a time loop game, the initial fun of the loop can’t really persist throughout the entire 4-5 hour experience. The apartment is small, not all of your ideas to change things will have an impact, and sometimes – sometimes – you will finally make a breakthrough, only for the game to throw you in a bad-end state and force you to re-do the entire loop for reasons that are, and there’s no use mincing words here: complete bullshit.
I think, of the two, the first one is the one that will stick in most players’ heads.
Tock.
We’re back to the night of the game’s release. The wife has just told us to let her know when we’re ready for dessert. My girlfriend has the mouse.
My girlfriend opens the fridge. There’s two plates there. Dessert. She takes a plate.
Upon closing the fridge, she spots a knife on the kitchen counter.
She takes it. The knife is visible in her inventory.
She drags the knife over to the wife, who is sitting on the couch, reading a book.
‘Wait, no—‘ I try.
My girlfriend is laughing.
It’s too late.
‘Hey, honey,’ the main character says, ‘could you come over here for a sec?’
Tick.
It’s really difficult to overstate just how bad the game’s last set of revelations are. It’s something you would throw out as a joke – in fact, I did think of it, as a joke twist, while we were playing it. I dismissed it as being nonsensical, but I can see a lot of people getting there through process of elimination.
The guy trying to kill you and your wife is a cop who wants a gold pocket watch. He wants it to pawn it and use the money for his daughter’s cancer treatment. He knows your wife has it, and he’s willing to kill over it, because your wife stole it from her dad, who she killed years and years ago. Except, as it turns out, she didn’t – it was her secret half-brother, born through an affair between her father and her nanny. You can bring all of this to light in one of the loops, everything gets resolved, everything gets cleared up, the cop vows to track down this elusive half-brother, and the game ends.
Except it doesn’t.
The loops still haven’t ended.
There’s only three characters – two of them have had their backstories explored. There’s talk of some unknown person that did something bad, but nobody really knows who or where they are.
The loops still haven’t ended.
You can do the math.
I imagine most people would.
Tock.
The main character is stabbing his wife to death.
‘What the fuck.’ I’m shocked the game let us do this right off the bat.
The wife is now the ground, lying in a pool of her own blood. There’s blood on the protagonist’s shirt. When you loot the wife’s corpse, you can take the keys to her apartment and the book she was reading.
My girlfriend sits on the dining table and places the plate of dessert she took from the fridge earlier.
She begins to eat it.
Tick.
Of course, the reason why the twist makes no sense is because the protagonist doesn’t seem to remember the murder. Or the fact that he’s the half-brother. It’s a reveal that seems to shock him as much as it’s supposed to shock us.
And after the reveal—
The game still isn’t over.
You’re supposed to use the pocket watch to – maybe? – go back in time and try to change the past, where you have a conversation with your father – who is also voiced by Willem Dafoe? – and then you can tell him ‘yeah, I actually don’t wanna fuck my sister’, you get transported to an alternate timeline where you’re alone – it’s daylight, it’s still the same apartment, but there isn’t a single piece of furniture in it.
Of course, you can always use the pocket watch again and meet Dad-Dafoe to tell him ‘actually, no, screw you, I DO wanna fuck my sister’, at which point you get returned to the original loop.
There is, of course, also a third ending, where you use the pocket watch to talk to Dad-Dafoe, and bring up the book your wife was reading. The book itself is about time itself being the greatest enemy (or something like that, it feels so hap-hazardly thrown in there as a theme that I barely remember it, even though it’s supposed to be relatively fresh), and Dad-Dafoe agrees to hypnotize you, letting you forget all about your sister.
At which point, all your progress gets deleted, and the game restarts completely. You’re back in the elevator, you go down the Kubrick hallway, you get into the apartment and the loops start all over again.
...What?
Tock.
The cop bursts in. He sees the wife. He sees you.
He is confused.
Tick.
No – seriously – what? How does that make sense? Are we supposed to assume that the reason the protagonist doesn’t remember that he married his wife was because the Dad hypnotized him? In that case, why does he end up killing him?
Or, are we supposed to presume that the entire game isn’t actually happening? The current ‘present’ is actually just a construction in the protagonist’s mind – an imagined future if he keeps going down this path? If he activates the watch to ‘go back in time’, he’s actually returning to the present, to the conversation he’s having with his father over what to do with the fact he’s into his sister? Then, the ending where you’re alone is him imagining that he’s going to end up lonely if he tries to move on from being in love with her?
But then, what is the hypnosis ending supposed to communicate to us? The game restarting completely implies we’ve just converged back to the original chain of events which, again, doesn’t make any sense!
What is this game trying to FUCKING SAY?
Tock.
‘This is pretty neat.’ I admit to my girlfriend. ‘I mean it’s – you’re fucked up – but I guess I respect that they let you just flat-out stab your wife right off the bat. Maybe. I mean, I think I would’ve personally rail-roaded the player through the first loop, just so the characters… actually get established. So, anyway, maybe this time, we should actually let things play out as they w—’
My girlfriend stabs the wife again, this time hiding in the closet.
‘—Okay then. Well.’ I chuckle. ‘Let’s see where this goes.’
‘You likin’ the game so far?’ she asks me, grinning.
‘Yeah. I think it’ll be a good time. Probably.’
‘Probably.’
‘You never know with these things.’ I shrug, watching as the cop drags the protagonist out of the walk-in closet, having found him almost immediately.
