This review contains spoilers
Back at E3 2019 12 Minutes was one of the first games that really caught my eye during the Xbox press conference. A Telltale style story game around a timeloop murder that you have to prevent in only 12 minutes that starred some high profile actors like William Defore, Daisy Ridley, and James McAvoy? It initially sounded like something I'd really enjoy back when it was revealed two years ago. Then I actually played it and I was pretty disappointed if I'm being entirely honest. This entire review is basically one giant spoiler because there's really no way to talk about this game without going heavily into spoilers for it's story due to the fact that it's effectively a modern point and click adventure game.
Speaking of being a point and click adventure game, I feel like that kind of game was not the best idea for this sort of plot. I have nothing against point and click games but in a game where you're going to be repeating things I feel like it might need a bit more to it terms of how you actually play in order to keep the player engaged. I say this because in 12 minutes you'll be repeating a lot of dialogue and conversation options over and over again in order to reach the new content that you can now access after the last loop that you went through assuming you made progress. Eventually you get to a point where you repeat the same conversation trees so many times that you just want it to be over. While this would most likely be an issue with almost any kind of time loop game, it feels especially frustrating here just due to how the core element of the game is the conversations between characters and there is no other kind of gameplay to keep you entertained with. Ultimately I feel like the format works against the story of this game and makes it more repetitive than it would be if there were more fleshed out gameplay elements to it.
Now actually tackling the story itself, there is a lot to unpack here. The basic synopsis of the plot is that your character, named "the husband", comes home from work and are surprised by your wife, "the wife", and are told that she is pregnant. The celebrations are cut short though when a police officer, "the officer", makes you let him in and then he kills your wife over a pocket watch her father used to own. Over the course of the loops you eventually learn that the officer believes the wife killed her father, and over each loop you have to try and find a way to prove that she didn't do it to the officer in order to break the loop and stop him from killing her and potentially you. This is a very interesting premise for a plot and I'm all for it, the problem comes in its execution which I already touched on earlier as well as in it's two major twists.
You do manage to prove that your wife is not who murdered her father, but rather it was her brother from the affair her father had based on information the officer had and the timings of the death and where your wife was. You then end up finding out that the husband was actually that brother. This unleashes a whole slew of problems both narratively and in what it makes the player feel. Going to save the narrative aspect of this for after we talk about the second twist in the game, but in regards to how this makes a player feel I'm not exactly sure what they were trying to go for here. The game does eventually paint the husband and wife being related as a bad thing in the true ending, the problem being that the keyword there is eventually.
Before you get to the true endings that has the main character either abandoning his sister wife or being hypnotized by their dead father to forget about his feelings for his sister (we'll get to that) you have to go through multiple loops where the husband either tries to justify their incestuous relationship or just refuses to acknowledge it and keeps trying to solve the loop as if they were still just two random people who loved each other. It all feels very weird and unnecessary while playing and I'm not sure what the intent of the writers was with this? The incest is treated as a bad thing by the other character that knows, but the main character who you're supposed to agree with actively fights against this idea until he's basically forced to give up by another character. It's treated as a sad thing that the two of them have to separate over this when like, I feel like this shouldn't have been something that even happened in the first place given some aspects related to the other major twist of the game.
So the second twist of the game is that the officer who breaks in and murders you and your wife is the father of both of you. This is never explicitly said but both the officer and the father are voiced by William Defoe with the exact same inflection and tone in their speaking so I'm pretty sure they have to be the same character based on this. Unless they were just lazy and decided not to get a fourth voice actor for the character who has about 4 scenes. Regardless going under the the assumption that Defoe's characters are one in the same, this along with the brother twist create a pretty big problem. That problem being "how did no one recognize the others?" If the husband is Defoe's son and his wife's brother, and Defoe is the dad of both of them, wouldn't one of them have recognize the other or at least the voice of them? This kind of breaks the whole narrative for me because as far as I remember it's never explained why the brother doesn't remember his sister or killing his father, he just kind of doesn't. So because of that it feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere with nothing other than the mention of a brother character existing at all acting as foreshadowing for this fact.
Even then, the wife should have recognized her father's voice or her younger brother since she doesn't have any kind of memory lose in the narrative since a big part of the loops is getting her to open up and tell us what happened several years ago. To top this off we actively see the father die in one of the flashback loops where he confronts the brother over wanting to have a relationship with his sister. You watch him die yet he's still present in the main game as an antagonistic force that no one remembers somehow. I don't like being too negative about things but these plot twists feel like they were made specifically for the shock factor of the player and not to tell a coherent story because they create so many inconsistencies that feel impossible to look past for me.
I really wanted to like this game because of how excited I was going into it, but ultimately I just did not enjoy this game. It has a great set up as well as an all star cast, but the writing and gameplay loop just don't come together in a satisfying way while also just ultimately being uncomfortable and frustrating.
2/10
Speaking of being a point and click adventure game, I feel like that kind of game was not the best idea for this sort of plot. I have nothing against point and click games but in a game where you're going to be repeating things I feel like it might need a bit more to it terms of how you actually play in order to keep the player engaged. I say this because in 12 minutes you'll be repeating a lot of dialogue and conversation options over and over again in order to reach the new content that you can now access after the last loop that you went through assuming you made progress. Eventually you get to a point where you repeat the same conversation trees so many times that you just want it to be over. While this would most likely be an issue with almost any kind of time loop game, it feels especially frustrating here just due to how the core element of the game is the conversations between characters and there is no other kind of gameplay to keep you entertained with. Ultimately I feel like the format works against the story of this game and makes it more repetitive than it would be if there were more fleshed out gameplay elements to it.
Now actually tackling the story itself, there is a lot to unpack here. The basic synopsis of the plot is that your character, named "the husband", comes home from work and are surprised by your wife, "the wife", and are told that she is pregnant. The celebrations are cut short though when a police officer, "the officer", makes you let him in and then he kills your wife over a pocket watch her father used to own. Over the course of the loops you eventually learn that the officer believes the wife killed her father, and over each loop you have to try and find a way to prove that she didn't do it to the officer in order to break the loop and stop him from killing her and potentially you. This is a very interesting premise for a plot and I'm all for it, the problem comes in its execution which I already touched on earlier as well as in it's two major twists.
You do manage to prove that your wife is not who murdered her father, but rather it was her brother from the affair her father had based on information the officer had and the timings of the death and where your wife was. You then end up finding out that the husband was actually that brother. This unleashes a whole slew of problems both narratively and in what it makes the player feel. Going to save the narrative aspect of this for after we talk about the second twist in the game, but in regards to how this makes a player feel I'm not exactly sure what they were trying to go for here. The game does eventually paint the husband and wife being related as a bad thing in the true ending, the problem being that the keyword there is eventually.
Before you get to the true endings that has the main character either abandoning his sister wife or being hypnotized by their dead father to forget about his feelings for his sister (we'll get to that) you have to go through multiple loops where the husband either tries to justify their incestuous relationship or just refuses to acknowledge it and keeps trying to solve the loop as if they were still just two random people who loved each other. It all feels very weird and unnecessary while playing and I'm not sure what the intent of the writers was with this? The incest is treated as a bad thing by the other character that knows, but the main character who you're supposed to agree with actively fights against this idea until he's basically forced to give up by another character. It's treated as a sad thing that the two of them have to separate over this when like, I feel like this shouldn't have been something that even happened in the first place given some aspects related to the other major twist of the game.
So the second twist of the game is that the officer who breaks in and murders you and your wife is the father of both of you. This is never explicitly said but both the officer and the father are voiced by William Defoe with the exact same inflection and tone in their speaking so I'm pretty sure they have to be the same character based on this. Unless they were just lazy and decided not to get a fourth voice actor for the character who has about 4 scenes. Regardless going under the the assumption that Defoe's characters are one in the same, this along with the brother twist create a pretty big problem. That problem being "how did no one recognize the others?" If the husband is Defoe's son and his wife's brother, and Defoe is the dad of both of them, wouldn't one of them have recognize the other or at least the voice of them? This kind of breaks the whole narrative for me because as far as I remember it's never explained why the brother doesn't remember his sister or killing his father, he just kind of doesn't. So because of that it feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere with nothing other than the mention of a brother character existing at all acting as foreshadowing for this fact.
Even then, the wife should have recognized her father's voice or her younger brother since she doesn't have any kind of memory lose in the narrative since a big part of the loops is getting her to open up and tell us what happened several years ago. To top this off we actively see the father die in one of the flashback loops where he confronts the brother over wanting to have a relationship with his sister. You watch him die yet he's still present in the main game as an antagonistic force that no one remembers somehow. I don't like being too negative about things but these plot twists feel like they were made specifically for the shock factor of the player and not to tell a coherent story because they create so many inconsistencies that feel impossible to look past for me.
I really wanted to like this game because of how excited I was going into it, but ultimately I just did not enjoy this game. It has a great set up as well as an all star cast, but the writing and gameplay loop just don't come together in a satisfying way while also just ultimately being uncomfortable and frustrating.
2/10