Twelve Minutes Review

Bill @#%#^& Murray. He’s not in this game, but I like him, and he did Groundhog Day which is more or less the starting point for describing what the core of Twelve Minutes is. It’s also just about as deep an explanation as one can give without spoiling the experience. Also, I like saying Bill Fucking Murray.

As the husband in a young and apparently steamy relationship, you play out a seemingly innocuous evening returning home from work to his wife who has made dessert for the two and is excited about a night in. As the evening progresses and you spend it around the apartment and with the wife, you are soon hit with a reset – you’re back at the point of walking through the front door and your wife is greeting you all over again. Confused at first but eventually realizing his predicament, the husband discovers that he is reliving the same few minutes over and over again and sets out to understand why and more importantly figure out how to stop it from continuing.

How you accomplish that lies in every action you take and every reaction you make with the limited time you have before you’re sent back to square one. This is where Twelve Minutes will either grab you and win you over or lose you and have you ranting about how overrated the entire experience is. While much of what you choose to do can be seemingly quite obvious, some of what you have to do to progress isn’t nearly as readily surfaced. Much of that more obtuse stuff still plays out in a way that you might expect but that isn’t always the case and frustration can set in when it doesn’t. I only really had one instance that I could say wasn’t thought out so well by the developer, but I could see a few others perhaps catching people off guard as well. In fairness, there are an impressive number of scenarios and paths that the devs thought out and accounted for when it comes to player choices. I did some of the most ridiculous things I could cook up and with few exceptions, the devs managed to think of them all and had an answer to all my crazy ideas – sometimes with pretty hilarious results.

With that being said, in my quest to do and see everything the game had to offer, I did manage to nearly soft-lock it in one scenario and completely broke the game and my save file in another. We’re talking about completely broken and irreparable damage to the file which meant if I wanted to revisit things I’d have to start from scratch. The result was pretty hilarious though, all things considered. Still, hopefully, they can fix these rare bugs in the future.

The story itself, in its entirety, is well done and full of twists and turns – some you may see coming while others might surprise you. It’s hard to say much without giving things away, but the way in which the narrative is layered upon your numerous loops is satisfying and the payoff in the end makes for an equally satisfying conclusion. In particular, the quasi-after-game that awaits you hit me in a way that the rest of the game hadn’t been able to up to that point and really did a great job of playing the strings of nostalgia. There are moments of levity met with jarringly dark scenarios and it’s anything but one note despite its nature.

As you might imagine, in a game that involves such repetition, the characters involved probably have to do a lot of heavy lifting to keep your attention. If you didn’t already know you might be surprised to hear that Twelve Minutes has an impressive list of talent voicing the characters. James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe headline the casting, and it was certainly one of the talking points ahead of the game’s release. The writing is good, providing believable interactions much of the time with some standout bits here and there. The delivery of said writing is obviously also quite good given the talent on hand but I can’t say it was a remarkable addition to the game. It may be one of those things where you just don’t appreciate it for the lack of knowing what it’s like without, but I suspect the game gets more out of the name associations than it does the performances provided.

Being nearly entirely seen from the top-down perspective, Twelve Minutes’ visual choices seem to be geared more toward a utilitarian goal than a purely aesthetic choice. It makes you feel a bit more like an observer than a direct participant, even though you do play as the husband. The animations can be a bit janky sometimes, and while it’s not going to win any awards for its visuals it achieves what it needs to. Despite the sights being neither here nor there, the sounds are better served and in unison with the top-down perspective help ensure you’re picking up on as many things as possible without beating you over the head with it. This is ultimately a narrative piece and so I can’t begrudge the game for not having amazing visual design and polish, but thankfully it’s not a train wreck either – it’s serviceable, and that’s enough in this case.

Twelve Minutes if nothing else is a unique experience, and when you create something relatively unique it often comes with some caveats that not everyone will appreciate. It’s not a particularly long game, but it gets a lot out of the time that it takes and comes to a close without overstaying its welcome. Much discussion around whether or not Twelve Minutes is actually a great game has been had and will likely continue to be had in the future because each player’s experience can differ so dramatically and not always for the better. If you’re someone who enjoys more narrative-driven games or just wants to try something that’s a bit outside the box, Twelve Minutes provides a healthy serving of both. Without much to drag it down otherwise, if that sounds intriguing enough to you then I can definitely recommend spending a few hours with Twelve Minutes.