The top-down perspective obscures the characters’ faces, but it doesn’t make the violence feel any less real. There’s the violence that the intruder visits upon the man and his wife, some of which you must watch over and over again, due to the nature of the game. Even describing it as “not for the faint of heart” feels inadequate. And it only becomes more grim as you get further into the game. The story in Twelve Minutes is oppressively dark. The more progress I made, the more ominous the proceedings began to feel. But I would’ve appreciated it if the game could’ve dropped a more heavy-handed clue or two after noticing my lack of meaningful progress. I don’t think Twelve Minutes would be better with a built-in hint system, à la old-school adventure games. While certain lines of dialogue serve as clues - if the wife “didn’t hear you come in,” what happens if she doesn’t see you, either? - I hadn’t been able to put two and two together in this specific case, and it became immensely frustrating. But at turning points that unlock major developments, the game can be incredibly restrictive in the sequences of events that you need to pull off. The possibility space in Twelve Minutes is massive, and it’s natural that it narrows as you approach the later stages. I had to ask for help from another Polygon staffer who had been playing the game. I was banging my head against a wall, trying everything I could think of, to no avail. I had been able to come up with two different pieces of proof, but she needed more.
One of the game’s early obstacles is convincing the man’s wife that he’s stuck in a time loop. The dialogue trees change in real time to reflect events that have occurred and information that the man has learned, so doing or saying something just a few seconds earlier or later can open up new paths or foreclose them. More importantly - and appropriately, for this game - time is always of the essence. For one thing, I rarely encountered a situation where I wanted to try something that the developers hadn’t accounted for. Yet the game gets an impressive amount of mileage out of them. These are the only real mechanics at play in Twelve Minutes, aside from the dialogue choices. Image: Luis Antonio/Annapurna Interactive Finally, you have the ability to examine inventory items to reveal more information about them. For instance, if you pick up a mug and then drag it from the inventory to a sink, the man will fill the cup with water if you drag the cup of water from the inventory to the man’s wife, he will hand it to her. Where appropriate, you can also combine items from your inventory with objects or people in the environment. Whenever you move the cursor over something you can interact with, the name of that person or object pops up if it’s an item you can pick up, you’ll see a little upward arrow as well.
That nugget of information will then nudge you down another path.ĭespite the limited instructions, you’ll grasp the fundamentals quickly.
In most cases, a failed outcome - and there will be dozens of them before you reach one of the game’s endings - will teach you something. I never tired of the joy of discovery in this game, of coming up with a hypothesis and then testing it. This is where Twelve Minutes excels: It gives you a sandbox and the tools to play in it, and doesn’t hold your hand. I do wish the game didn’t have to put me through its particular wringer to get there - but maybe that’s part of the point. And in that respect, it succeeds: I spent a lot of time pondering these ideas as I prepared to write this review. These are the kinds of thought-provoking concepts that Twelve Minutes, the long-anticipated game from indie developer Luis Antonio, seeks to probe. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time on the internet, you know that what one has seen, one cannot unsee. Once we’ve become aware of something - learned of its existence, experienced it with our senses - it’s difficult to forget it (or, at least, to actively forget it). This truth of the universe ties closely with the human faculty of memory. Perhaps the most obvious practical limitation imposed by time’s arrow is the principle of cause and effect - or, to put it another way, our understanding that actions have consequences. This immutable law of nature puts all kinds of constraints on our existence. Time only ever flows in one direction, so far as we know: forward.
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