A man comes home to his small apartment, greets his wife and the two make affectionate small talk. But within the next five minutes, a cop will burst in, tie them both up, accuse the woman of murdering her father and finally strangle the man unconscious. At this point, time resets and the husband is mysteriously jolted back to the moment he arrived in the flat. He has 12 minutes to work out what his wife has done and why. And he’ll live those same 12 minutes over and over again until it’s solved.
This is the intriguing premise behind Annapurna Interactive’s compact, tense point-and-click adventure, created by ex-Rockstar and Ubisoft developer Luis Antonio. Clearly inspired by the psychological thrillers of Hitchcock, Kubrick and Verhoeven, Twelve Minutes gives us a top-down chessboard view of a stage limited to just three rooms, with all the space provided by the backstories of the protagonists. Taking the role of the husband, the player must use each new playthrough to discover fresh information, exploring the apartment and working out how an array of seemingly unrelated objects – a mobile phone, a knife, a photo, a jar of sleeping pills – can be utilised or combined to open fresh conversational and deductive pathways.
What’s really clever about the time-loop structure is the way that even dead-end routes and bad ideas tend to provide vital snippets of background information or handy hints to point you back in the right direction. Seemingly unimportant early revelations suddenly take on profound significance later on, so your allegiances and theories constantly shift and buckle. Each time you’re zapped back to the start, you have a new lead to explore or action to try or theory to test, and this keeps you engrossed while trapped in Antonio’s claustrophobic scenario.
The game also manages to avoid some of the pitfalls of point-and-click design. There is, for example, none of the inventory spamming of classic LucasArts adventures, where players would end up randomly combining objects in a desperate attempt to make progress. Here, everything has a clear single use – you just have to find it.
There are certainly frustrating moments; trying to coax characters into particular conversations or specific positions in order to enact your plans can take longer than necessary, even though you’re able to fast-forward through familiar conversations. Along the way, the rather clipped, functional dialogue doesn’t really give the stellar voice cast of James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe much room to show off their immense talent. There are also a few plot holes that never really get fully explained, although that ensures you have plenty to think about and argue with – even after the main six to eight-hour thriller is apparently over.
Twelve Minutes is not the first game to explore the concept of the time loop. Zelda, Ephemeral Fantasia and Returnal have all been there. However, as a stylish, twisted take on movies such as Rear Window, Eyes Wide Shut and Chinatown, it is an engrossing experience that marries noir sensibilities and puzzle gameplay into a dense Freudian nightmare.
Twelve Minutes is out 19 August, £19.49