Twelve Minutes is a title that I wanted to discover since its release last year. Being a big fan of thrillers like Hitchcock, Kubrick and Verhoeven; this trippy, dark, and time-consuming mystery game looked up my street. Recently I finally had the chance to check this thing out and I’m happy to report that it didn’t disappoint.
Twelve Minutes is out now and is available on PC, Playstation, and Xbox consoles.
The best way to describe Twelve Minutes without revealing too much, uses an oxymoronic phrase; This game is simple, yet complex. At first glance, the game is made up of nothing more than three characters, three rooms, around fifty clickable objects and quite a bit of plot.
It’s only once the player spends time going through the motions of at least two twelve-minute time loops, that the sheer number of layers in Twelve Minutes begin to reveal themselves. While some of these layers are revealed through actions that can be performed by the player, the majority of them are revealed through dialogue between characters in the game.
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Without an engaging scenario, Twelve Minutes would be quite a monotonous experience. Luckily, Luis Antonio and Steve Lerner have managed to create something that’s as much a slow-burning revelation as it is gripping material on the edge of your seat. Whether Twelve Minutes was a novel, it would be an impossible to put down page-turner.
It also helps that the game’s three characters are expertly played by three talented actors respectively. The player-character is voiced by James McAvoy, who perfectly encapsulates the frustrating helplessness of his situation. Daisy Ridley plays the woman and does a great job playing a character who is clearly hiding something.
However, Willem Dafoe’s brilliantly menacing performance as a cop is easily the most standout performance in the game. The amount of impending peril Dafoe can bring to a scene using nothing more than his voice is truly remarkable. That said, it also has the performance range to explore the spectrum of emotions displayed by the cop as the mystery continues to deepen.
Twelve Minutes is obviously a very simple game visually. While the lighting is nice, the character models and motion animations are pretty rudimentary, with some of the animations resembling those seen in The Sims. But the visuals aren’t the point in Twelve Minutes. The simplicity of the game’s visuals does the job very well and never serves as a distraction from the intriguing plot, so I have absolutely no problem with them.
All in all, I really enjoyed my time with Twelve Minutes. I don’t know if I can see myself playing again, because once the player learns of the reveal, there’s not much reason to replay the thing. However, it was still a fun and quite unique experience and the concept of a game of this style is a smart one.
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It’s definitely one of the most memorable point-and-click adventures I’ve ever played and at the discounted asking price the game is currently selling for, I recommend it as a no-brainer. Especially if you happen to be a fan of classic suspense thrillers, like Twelve Minutes is basically a great love letter to this whole storytelling subgenre.
8/10
Twelve Minutes was reviewed on PS5 with code provided by fortyseven communications.
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