Twelve Minutes may just be the most confining adventure game you have played in a bit. Developed by Luis Antonio and published by Annapurna Interactive, Twelve Minutes is a top-down perspective game set in a small apartment suite shared by your character and his wife. The whole drama could have gone down in 12 minutes, but this single-player game is filled with so many interesting twists and turns that can keep you locked in for six to eight hours or more.

Built on the Unity Engine, this thriller is compatible with Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and 5. Netflix will release the iOS and Android versions in the future.

Dynamic Gameplay Set In A Confined Space

The game couple lives in a small studio apartment consisting of a living room, bedroom, kitchen area, bathroom, and closet. You control the husband who returns from work and joins his wife in their apartment for some after-work relaxation. Without taking any action, 12 minutes later, you find that the wife is pregnant.

Then, a police officer shows up to accuse the wife of killing her father many years ago and tries to arrest her; in the process of the arrest, he knocks out the husband and kills the wife and unborn child. Once this happens, the game resets to your character entering the apartment.

Every time things go south and you walk into the apartment again, your job is to determine why the cop suspects the wife, how to prevent her arrest, and find any other way of stopping that loop of disaster. Remembering you have only 12 minutes, you need to act fast and look around the apartment because the answer might just be somewhere. You are given as little information as possible about your goal, which leaves you with trial and error. Your character is the only one who can retain the knowledge of the previous attempts, so you need to learn from your mistakes and watch the reactions.

The game has a point-and-click style where you are free to do as many things as possible, except leave the apartment. The claustrophobia heightens your sense of tension, and you begin to wonder how to solve such a complex mystery from within your small apartment. This exciting claustrophobia can quickly get annoying as you become desperate.

Twelve Minutes is an iterative game where you must learn from your mistakes to break the loop. When the loop restarts, you have the freedom to fast-forward through dialogues you’ve been through many times. This reduces fatigue from listening to the same things over and again.

Great Casting And Vocal Performance

One of the best parts of this game is the amazing voice acting for the characters. It is undoubtedly a stellar cast as we have James McAvoy, who plays young Professor X in X-Men, as the main character. Daisy Ridley from Star Wars plays the wife, and the legendary Willem Dafoe (Green Goblin) voices the cop/intruder. You can tell that the actors were given a level of freedom to voice the many outcomes of the game.

The top-down approach also made it easy for the actors to emote freely without trying to match the facial expressions of their characters. Willem Dafoe gives a particularly chilling performance as an intruder. Asides from the occasional violence his character inflicts, you can sense his imposing personality from the acting. Coupled with the thrilling soundtrack, the game injects the stakes into your bloodstream like a good thriller.

Simple And Minimalistic Graphics

The stripped-down, minimalistic approach for Twelve Minutes is interesting. On the one hand, it simplifies the world and helps you focus on the strategy you need to escape the nightmarish loop. On the other hand, staring at this bland, regular apartment for eight hours can be mind-numbing. The good part is that the graphic style would be the least of your worries with an exceptional story and an even better payoff.

You have items scattered around the house like in a regular apartment, such as coffee mugs, a kitchen knife, spoons, desserts, cell phones, etc. You can pick them up and combine them to make a part of the game. Knowing when to use them is a key part of advancing the gameplay. You also have the freedom to move things around the apartment, sometimes for no apparent reason, and occasionally, they reveal interesting things.

The developers avoided the pitfalls of point-and-click games, such as inventory spamming, where you combine random objects to make progress. Every home item has a single clear use, and you must find it. Even the seeming dead ends or bad ideas can lead you to the vital snippets and information you need that eventually get you on track.

There are slight glitches and clipping in the movement of the characters, especially during scuffles. However, these glitches do not diminish the efficacy of the game. In fact, they quickly diminish in importance, and you learn to live with them.

Intense Soundtrack Keeps You On Your Toes

There is a drama-enhancing score that plays subtly throughout the game. It increases and decreases expertly to punctuate key parts of the game. The soundtrack sounds like something out of an espionage action sequence that keeps you on your toes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you will find from discussing with others that there are multiple ways to resolve this conundrum, but you need to find out the best way. This review has intentionally avoided spoilers because the payoff is incredible, and you should walk through it yourself.

Twelve Minutes is a thriller with an amalgamation of violence, gore, and discoveries. It is not the first game to explore the time loop concept, but it offers a certain level of freedom that regular adventure games cannot provide. The top-down perspective is simply phenomenal and gives freedom for you to explore the room. This game comes highly recommended if you are a huge fan of psychological thrillers and love unraveling mysteries.