![]() ![]() We're never allowed to get close to the characters because this is their story. There's another puppet-master at work here. The bird's eye view that persists all throughout creates a sense of distance between player and scene, which serves as a constant reminder that the control we may think we have is an illusion. ![]() When Twelve Minutes greets us for the first time with a Shining nod, it's forecasting the dark journey that awaits. This is a thriller that's studied at the feet of masters. The single-apartment setting summons up memories of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, and the fixed overhead perspective is a similarly Hitchcockian flourish. ![]() ![]() The floor tiling outside the apartment - which you get a clear look at only once, the first time you start the game - is an obvious intentional homage to the Overlook Hotel carpet in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. It's a thought-provoking and suspenseful kind of fun that wears its influences proudly. If you find out a new detail in your wife's personal history, you may find you can probe her more directly in future loops thanks to the added context. If you spot a phone number somewhere, you can call it. This is a game of observation and experimentation. Twelve Minutes doesn't hold your hand or guide you along in any way, beyond some basic control explanations right up front. You're meant to poke and prod everything, and find as much useful information in the environment as you do in dialogue. The clutter and build-up of a lived life scattered all around the apartment opens the way to clues. The loop always resets in the end, but the idea is for you to step into each one armed with new information that you can use to suss out even more details.Ĭonversations with your wife and the cop unearth family histories and unseen secrets. Your clicks equate to a growing understanding of what's really going on. You use the mouse cursor to move, converse, and investigate points of interests in the apartment. The influence you can have on how a loop plays out is forever limited by what you know. We watch all of it unfold, every time, from a bird's eye view that gives us a fully detailed view of each of the apartment's three rooms while leaving faces obscured. That cop is always going to show up about five minutes later, shattering what should have been an idyllic evening.Īnd without your influence, the scenario is always going to end the same way: Wife and husband facedown on the floor, hands ziptied behind them, while an angry cop gets to the business of murdering them. Your wife is always there, waiting to share a special dessert and some happy news. Twelve Minutes is a reference to the game's core time loop, in which a husband walks into his apartment after work and a series of inescapable events play out. The quirk to all of this is right there in the title. As players, it's our job to tug at the corners of those identities by unearthing snippets of information and then using that knowledge to delve deeper into the central mystery of why a happy couple's joyous evening would be violently interrupted by a murderous cop and his obsession with a pocket watch. No one in this brief, character-focused story gets to have a name, but they all come packing deeply layered identities. It's a dark, sometimes torturous, and yet strangely compelling dive down the rabbit hole of lies: Both the ones we wield against others and the ones we tell ourselves. The new interactive thriller conceived by Luis Antonio, a Rockstar Games and Ubisoft veteran, and published by Annapurna Interactive hides many secrets. The first time I loaded up Twelve Minutes and pushed past the intro screen, I watched as the letters spelling out the title slowly faded from view until only four were left: L-I-E-S. ![]()
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