Twelve Minutes is a real-time top-down interactive thriller with an accessible click and drag interface. Featuring James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. The game blends the dream-like tension of The Shining with the claustrophobia of Rear Window and the fragmented structure of Memento.
Ultimately, we found 12 Minutes to be a trite adventure that squanders its initial intrigue almost instantly. We can see how someone else might get a kick out of its star-studded silliness, but in a gaming landscape littered with time loop games, we found this one extremely tedious at best.
Twelve Minutes' time loop puzzle is layered and weird, but its short time limit doesn't find the sweet spot between tense and frustrating.
There are, of course, multiple endings, and the minutes leading up to each resolution can be flavoured with violence and revelation, or laced with deceit. The question is: Do we care?
I doubt that Twelve Minutes will go down as a crowd pleaser. If the revelation fails to move you then all that came before it was for naught. But if it catches you unexpectedly, as it did me, then Twelve Minutes may linger in your mind as an unusually effective high concept piece.
12 Minutes is a statement of intent on the part of Luis Antonio, a video game that elevates him as a designer, and places him on the map after having gone through Rockstar Games and having participated in projects as disparate as The Witness or What Remains of Edith Finch. Now, he puts on the table his particular vision of graphic adventure, with a...
