Twelve Minutes review
Our Verdict
Twelve Minutes is a glory-led adventure title, but its time looping mechanic and riveting narrative are the real stars.
For
- Intriguing narrative
- Time-sensitive looping mechanic
- Unending sense of tension
- Focus on premeditation
Confronting
- Janky animation
- Uneven dialogue delivery
Tom's Guide Verdict
Twelve Minutes is a celebrity-led chance title, but its time looping mechanic and riveting narrative are the real stars.
Pros
- +
Intriguing narrative
- +
Time-sensitive looping mechanic
- +
Unending sense of tension
- +
Focus on premeditation
Cons
- -
Janky animation
- -
Uneven dialogue commitment
Twelve Minutes: SPECS
Platforms:PC, Xbox
Toll:$24.99
Release date:August 19, 2021
Genre:Take chances
Developer:Luis Antonio
Publisher:Annapurna Interactive
Twelve Minutes is an incredibly intimate tale, taking place on a romantic evening entirely within the confines of a single apartment. Taking on the office of a husband, yous come home to your married woman having made dessert and teasing that she has some special news to share with you lot.
The 2 of y'all exchange kisses, accept a seat on the burrow, and take some coincidental conversation. All seems well, and your anticipation of her big reveal conspicuously takes center stage. Y'all're blissfully unaware that tragedy waits outside the front end door.
Suddenly, a man challenge to be a police officeholder enters your dwelling house, ties you lot both upward, and accuses your wife of murdering her ain father. Struggle equally you might to get complimentary, yous soon find that your death is swift and inevitable. Luckily for you, it's also non the end, equally you awaken at the verbal moment yous entered the home, free to relive the very same harrowing intrusion time and time again with the hopes of agreement why.
As you lot'll see in our Twelve Minutes review, this curt but securely affecting game has a star-studded cast and an addictive gameplay mechanic that lends itself well to the mystery and intrigue that you're left to uncover.
Twelve Minutes review: Gameplay
Twelve Minutes is a point-and-click adventure, and Xbox and PC versions share the same navigation method of using a mouse cursor to click where yous'd like to go. Every bit you attempt to escape a time loop, y'all tin engage with your married woman and the intruder with a variety of conversation topics, or you can move around your apartment to pick up and combine items for afterwards use.
Memorizing the layout of the apartment and the location of notable items within it becomes your start goal, and information technology remains an of import ane throughout the unabridged experience. This claustrophobic drove of three rooms is all you lot'll be granted admission to for the majority of your six to eight hours of playtime, but the small explorable space is filled with a bevy of interactive components that ultimately office as an expansive toolkit for your sleuthing.
Each loop gives you a handful of minutes to interact with your wife, check out the abode, and do your best to move the plot forward by deducing exactly what to say or do upon the break-in. The trepidation of hearing the sound of the intruder closing in on your apartment lends the game nigh of its tension, too, peculiarly early on every bit you attempt to get your bearings and a firm grasp on your options. Once you hear the knock on the door, y'all know you have mere seconds to finalize any decisions you've made during that loop and cross your fingers that they pay off somehow.
No affair how many adjustments you lot brand, though, they're nonetheless likely to event in failure more often than not. That'southward the point of the game later on all, so if you're not able to withstand the onslaught of trial and mistake gameplay – solutions are sometimes astonishingly ambiguous – Twelve Minutes' may not be your cup of tea. Fortunately, the brusk nature of each loop and an ability to use some handy time skipping hither and there allow things to keep moving at a brisk enough step that the inherent repetition only rarely feels exhausting.
Twelve Minutes review: Story and setting
Regardless of your accept on Twelve Minutes' looping mechanics, it's hard non to exist gripped by the thrilling narrative that creator Luis Antonio has then delicately crafted. Every vocalisation line, every item, and every move you make has a purpose in your quest to understanding why y'all're living the aforementioned night once again and again.
As yous begin to peel back the many layers of the mystery, you're met with unsettling twists that examination both your empathy and morals in ways you never run into coming. And just when you think the previous eye-wrenching surprise was its concluding, at that place always seems to exist some other one lined up to dial you squarely in the gut.
Reaching those points requires a lot of hard work on your office, though, and volition never exist as unproblematic every bit you lot're thinking. When you lot happen to finally find fresh $.25 and pieces of vital data during a loop, you might assume that your next course of action is to reach that verbal same point and make some new choices, but that's not usually the case.
Instead, progressing through to the next large revelation requires premeditation, so you'll need to listen carefully to every line of dialogue and appraise your environment with the intention of using it to your advantage next go-effectually. You lot'll by and large be aiming to get alee of events before they even happen so that you can change the very timeline of the suspension-in altogether.
A proficient case of this takes place well-nigh the beginning of the game during the very first loop where you lot commencement acquire of a specific item the intruder is demanding from your married woman. Every bit he continues to aggressively request the particular, she denies she owns information technology at all, and you both end up dead. On the next loop, y'all tin ask your wife about her begetter's death and berate her about where she's hidden the detail, but she'll never open up to you virtually it.
This loop volition play out incessantly until you consider your married woman'due south offset line of dialogue when yous go habitation – "I didn't hear you come in" – as a hint to immediately hide from her next loop. By doing this, you can allow the incoming encounter play out without her having always known you got home. As she discloses entirely new information to the intruder, yous'll now exist privy to her exposed lies, providing you with ammunition yous can pocket for the side by side loop.
Twelve Minutes review: Visuals and sound
There's no anarchistic art way on display hither, and the sound of rain beating your windows makes upward the majority of ambient noise. Just I got the feeling that the game's mundane aesthetic of dimly lit rooms and dull colors was an intentional artistic option meant to identify a focus on the characters and their private nonetheless connected plights.
Honor-winning actors make full the three roles – James McAvoy as the husband, Daisy Ridley as the married woman, and Willem Dafoe as the intruder. Every bit expected, these talented stars bring the characters to life wonderfully when dialogue is allowed to accelerate naturally, but the fundamental design of the game can periodically inhibit this. Since you lot're constantly making choices in real-fourth dimension, vocalisation lines tin can end up cut and clipped together to facilitate an ever-evolving flow of events, making them come across as stiff and awkward at times.
Stiff, too, are the deportment of the characters, which are clumsily animated with jerky, unnatural movements that would await more at dwelling house in The Sims. This somewhat undermines the believability of emotional scenes, particularly when they uncomfortably clip through one another or wave their arms around erratically, but it's thankfully not distracting enough to ruin the otherwise stellar storytelling.
Twelve Minutes review: Verdict
Twelve Minutes produces a substantial sense of satisfaction with each new epiphany that inches you closer to escaping the awful circumstances in which you notice yourself. And though its vocalism work and animations aren't ever graceful, it's not hard to see that this thriller's primary objective is to spin a chilling yarn.
It succeeds admirably in doing exactly that by using its express space, small bandage, and compelling time loop mechanic to great upshot, awarding patient players with a quietly unnerving and masterfully crafted mystery worth unraveling.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/twelve-minutes
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