Twelve Minutes
PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Five minutes before that knock at the door, we can almost hear the steady tick of every second going by. Our wife enters from the bathroom. We haven’t got time for her to tell us it’s the “best night ever” because she’s prepared dessert (nor to wonder why there’s no main course) and so we push her away as she leans in for a kiss. “OK, rude,” she snorts, but affection can wait: we’ve got bigger things to worry about. Four minutes left. What haven’t we tried yet? We can, it seems, put the fake candle in the toilet, but that’s surely not going to change anything. Three minutes. The knife lying by the sink has yet to come in useful, but we pocket it anyway, adding it to the two plates of pudding, the Polaroid, the mug (full of water), the other mug (empty), and a pair of spoons. Perhaps playing the latter for our unwanted house guest for whose imminent arrival we’re hurriedly preparing will calm him down a bit. Then again, he’s played by Willem Dafoe, so probably not. Two minutes. What else? We suddenly remember the phone; we race to the closet and grab it from our coat. Then we close the door, peer out through the slats, and wait. This time, surely, our plan is going to work out.
Luis Antonio’s top-down thriller, about a seemingly ordinary couple (voiced by James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley) having the worst ever evening in, is built around that increasingly popular videogame concept, the time loop. It’s effectively a narrative Roguelike, in the sense that the chief gain from each go-around is knowledge, the kind that will allow you to make more informed (albeit only sometimes better) choices each time. But at heart it’s a classic point-and-click adventure, of the sort where you walk around with a suitcase’s worth of objects somehow stuffed inside your pockets, trying to use them on every environmental feature or combine them to progress. The key difference is that you’re against the clock. That pressure lends an extra frisson to what could easily be frustrating trial-and-error mechanics.
At times, Twelve Minutes is exasperating. Though the various narrative triggers don’t always follow a linear order, some demand very particular solutions. Take the knife, for example – or rather, don’t. It seems, when Dafoe’s intruder (who claims to be a cop, but you’ll have doubts from the moment he opens his mouth) is yelling at the panic-stricken Ridley to get down on the ground, that there are a few windows of opportunity while his back is turned. Yet by the time we’ve dragged the knife from our inventory at the top of the screen (the action considerately, and stylishly, freezing as the image goes fuzzy, with subtle noise lines suggesting you’re watching a VHS or CCTV feed) and the animation has played out, he’s in position to block the attack. One beating later, and we’re back to the beginning, with McAvoy likening his assailant to an ox – your first hint that a direct confrontation isn’t going to work. So what else? The sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet surely can’t be a red herring, but convincing our guest to accept a drink isn’t going to be easy.
We soon learn that if there’s a seemingly obvious solution, it’s probably the wrong one. But with the action largely confined to three rooms and a closet, there are only so many variables. And, as with McAvoy’s opening exclamation, there are clues seeded (and occasionally clumsily shoehorned) into the dialogue, to nudge you in the right direction. Sometimes, the way forward is counterintuitive: your natural instinct when Dafoe launches his tirade and you’re hidden out of sight is to intervene, but if you watch events play out, you may just uncover a fact that opens up a new dialogue branch. True, there are some situations for which you couldn’t reasonably have prepared. But pay attention, and you’ll discover something new on every loop – even if a plan start to hatch late on and you know you can only put it into practice on the next attempt. Such occasions might encourage you to end the loop prematurely, which throws up an intriguing moral quandary: you may know there are no permanent consequences to your actions, but killing someone makes you a murderer forever. Sometimes there’s no going back.
And sometimes there’s too much of it. Engrossing through it remains, as the plot twists grow more lurid and implausible, occasionally treading alarmingly close to David Cage territory, you get the sense that Antonio is deliberately leading you down cul-de-sacs to drag things out a little longer. Some awkward interactions, whether it’s stilted animations or immersion-breaking clipping, jar against the Hollywood sheen of the rest of it. And not even actors of this calibre can quite sell some dialogue that has clearly been written with exposition at front of mind. Perhaps that’s a holdover of its text-based origins (some lines that would read fine just sound wrong out of an actor’s mouth), but at times you might think the script could have used another pass.
All the same, even when it’s going wrong, Twelve Minutes exerts an uncommonly firm grip. Sometimes especially when it’s going wrong: when McAvoy lets out an anguished “motherfucker” after one carefully laid plan doesn’t come off, we’re thinking much the same thing, already concocting a revised strategy before Ridley has even entered the room. It is that rare game where the protagonist’s goals are constantly in sync with your own. His frustrations are yours, and (barring one plot point that observant players will see coming) discoveries enlighten and surprise you and him at once: one lategame development isn’t so much a shock revelation as a gradual, sickening realisation for you both. And then there are the moments when your plan works, and your pulse quickens as you realise what comes next is unknown, and you’re going to have to improvise.
Six minutes. Dafoe’s down. What now?
One late-game development isn’t so much a shock revelation as a gradual, sickening realisation