On paper, a groundhog day style narrative enclosed within a small apartment operating on 12 minute loops sounds like A Neat Idea™.

Sadly this neat idea has been stuffed to the brim with Really Fucking Terrible Ideas℠. Don't be fooled, all fancy wrapping on this puzzle box are determined to remind you of art that to the layman or standard reddit poster will associate with the pantheon of 'genius'. Damn that box art sure looks like Vertigo, you like Hitchcock right? Surely even someone as uncultured as a videogamer holds the master of suspense in high esteem. Take note of the carpet from The Shining along the hallway to your apartment. Wow, James McAvoy! Daisy Ridley!? Willem Dafoe!?!?! I know those names from real movies!

The first red flag that this game might not be all that neat is that the characters draw from much more modern [pretentious] conventions of art film. Wife. Cop. Father. Man? Wife-guy? Our protagonist isn't even given a noun. The cast is small enough that this lack of real human names is easy to not notice. What becomes more noticeable much faster is how our two main real actors are not doing a great job at real acting. Simple conversational lines from Ridley Wife are disjointed and sound like they were recorded for separate scenes before being awkwardly jammed together. McAvoy Man sounds like he just choked on his glass of water and is entirely unhappy to be here. Did something go wrong with the recording session? Regardless, the chemistry is absent.

So what do we do in the videogame? Twelve Minutes operates on basic point-click adventure systems. You have items in the apartment, they go in your magic pocket inventory. You can deploy the items from your pocket to poke them at puzzles and people puzzles. You can also speak to Wife. Either through logical deduction or fucking around enough you'll eventually poke with the right items/dialogue that extract the dialogue or reaction to advance the timeloop. But wait, how does the time loop work?

About half way through your 12 minute vignette your apartment will be invaded by Cop. He will handcuff Wife and Man to the floor while making claims of a murder committed and demanding a watch. Eventually Cop will beat the shit out of Man, hastened by your willingness to resist. So Cop acts as our primary timer for resetting the loop, although you can force it by attempting to leave out the front door or subduing Cop long enough for the 12 minutes to pass. This reveals the truth of the loop, killing Cop won't break it. You have no choice but to figure out what the deal is with the murder/watch and thus we have our thriller.

So with such a bare bones premise, surely the characters will be what carry the narrative right? lol. lmao. The couple have nothing going on except that Wife is pregnant and is about to surprise announce the news with a wrapped gift of baby clothes. There is no sense of self to these people outside of how heterosexual they are. (don't worry. it gets worse.)

By using your mysterious groundhog curse, you the player can uncover details on this supposed murder that has led the supposed Cop to break in. Turns out Wife shot her dad when she ran away from home and took a valuable watch with her. Cop (not a real cop btw) liked her dad so he's out for revenge, but also really needs that watch because his own daughter is dying from cancer.

Here we reach the 2nd red flag where the game starts to show its hand, in that the narrative is going to be relying primarily (entirely) on shock value to keep you the gamer interested in the mystery. This shock value manifests hilariously into the item poke-puzzle system with the ability to stab your wife to death with the kitchen knife. Why do this? She never threatens Man or enacts any violence in the present. We even find out she didn’t even kill her dad properly when she shot him with a gun. Even more baffling, Man apologizes profusely to her as he brutally stabs her to a slow, painful bleed out death (it’s fine, she gets better). Seemingly this only serves the purpose of clarifying that yes, in fact the knife would kill Cop if your avatar Man was simply better at stabbing. Even more hilariously, you can use this as a lazier way of subduing Wife if you can’t be bothered going through the process of poisoning her with sleeping pills. Triple hilariously, you can enjoy some tasty pudding while her blood seeps into the floorboards.

By now you’ll be far enough in to realise that even though the game allows you to skip old initiated dialogue, you can’t speed up or skip sequencing otherwise. You’re going to have to sit through the same Cop scenes over and over again to trial and error bumble your way through these puzzles, only to be punished with a fuckup loop reset if you dare try to speed things up. Oh you accidentally opened the front door too early, interrupting Cop’s phone call? Dead, do your puzzle set up again dumbass. Characters reacting to seeing things via a door being left open is believable sure, but why let the player fuck themselves over in such an annoying way when Man will refuse other actions based on the current sequence? There’s no interesting reaction from the failure state, so he should just refuse to open the door.

Anyway, we piece together the Wife didn’t actually kill her father, he lived only to die later on a day that she was provably miles away from the scene of the crime. It turns out that Wife and Father didn’t get along because he had an affair with his nanny that resulted in a child. The Monster, as her Mother called it. Monster Brother becomes suspect number one, as it becomes all too clear where this plot development is going. That’s right folks, Man knocked up his sister, because he somehow fucking forgot (????), decided to pursue and marry her. How did Man forget? Is he stupid?

I will direct you to think about how this game came out in 2021, by now the shock incest plot twist is well overplayed. What’s truly incredible about this writing is that the game is so confident in the strength of this reveal that it expects it to have any impact when the characters in question are so lacking in any texture at all. You think you have anything on Oldboy, Twelve Minutes? One of the greatest thriller narratives on unjust vindication? Even Game of Thrones, everyones now favourite punching bag of a crash and burn failure, had the decency to ground that twist in the ramifications it would have on the political tensions the central characters are entrenched in. Here we just have flavourless compulsory heterosexuality, existing purely to be undone by the nastiness of a meaningless script.

There are a handful of optional endings, but who cares honestly. The game doesn’t give you the decency of getting this over with, but I will. Maybe in a different story, the reveal of the time loop being a hypnotic manifestation of the mind would be an exciting twist. Fuck, I guess you should just rewatch Oldboy instead. Better yet, play The Forgotten City instead of Twelve Minutes if you want a time loop mystery. That game fucking rules.

One star.