Twelve Minutes

Here’s the thing about repetition: it’s an ambivalent element. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate learning tool, commonly used by tiny humans, called children, to mimic big humans, called adults, to discover how to act and behave in life. It’s how humans of all sizes learn how to speak a language, how to write, how to build objects and structures, how to cook, how to live in society – actually, some never learn this last part. Repetition can be relaxing, especially when it creates a routine: the familiarity of some elements and events can make us feel safe, in control of things. But on the other hand, repetition is also intrinsically tedious, since it’s anathema to change: we feel we are in control of things precisely because they remain the same. And repetition is exactly the element that is at the heart of time loop stories such as Twelve Minutes, a point-and-click adventure developed by Luis Antonio.

Such stories all have to deal with the same problem: how to prevent their repetitive structure from turning them into a tiresome experience? Games like Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale, and The Outer Wilds have all arrived at a similar solution: they invest in the good side of repetition, turning every loop into a learning experience, while making most of the repeated events and dialogue skippable or seamless. Twelve Minutes does neither of those things.

Twelve Minutes is about a nameless man – let’s call him James McAvoy – who’s stuck in a time loop. After a day’s work, he arrives home to his loving wife, who has a surprise for him. However, a man claiming to be a cop – let’s call him Willem Dafoe –, eventually knocks on their door, accuses the protagonist’s wife of murdering her father, asks her for a pocket watch, and when she doesn’t hand it to him, he beats McAvoy up, making the protagonist travel back in time to the moment when he arrived at the apartment.

These first minutes are very effective in establishing the core mysteries that will drive the narrative: is McAvoy’s wife innocent or did she really murder her father? If she did, what were her reasons to do it? What’s up with the pocket watch? Who is Dafoe’s character and why does he seem so angry?

The game doesn’t give us a command saying “Discover how to get out of the time loop” but it’s fairly obvious that’s the main objective. The question is how the protagonist must accomplish this, as there’s no indication of where to start to look for clues: the game wants us to experiment with things, explore the small apartment – it has just one bedroom, a bathroom, and the living room – and try some ideas. However, there’s a fatal design flaw that makes experimentation the most frustrating part of Twelve Minutes.

In narratives, there’s this thing called Red Herring, which is an element in the story whose purpose is to mislead us. They’re commonly used in whodunits, because the whole thing is about discovering who’s the culprit. In these types of stories, red herrings make the experience more entertaining because they turn the act of unraveling the truth more difficult: the narrative becomes a game where we have to discern which clues are there to make us suspect the wrong characters and which ones are really pointing to the real villain. Red herrings, therefore, are usually story-related elements used to conceal a specific piece of information so to make its eventual reveal surprising. Twelve Minutes manages to revolutionize this concept and present something akin to “mechanical red herrings”.

In point-and-click adventures, when we can pick up an object and add it to our inventory, it means that they’re going to be useful at some point in time. That’s because we can’t pick up all objects in the environment, so if the designers made that specific one interactable, we suppose it’s for a purpose.  Likewise, if we can make that object interact with another or if we can put it in an oddly specific place, we assume that’s part of the solution of a puzzle. Well, not in Twelve Minutes.

This game is rife with these mechanical red herrings, objects that we can pick up, interact with, and put in a specific place in the apartment, but that will serve no real purpose, except lead the protagonist directly back to the beginning of the loop. Take the fake candles at the living room table, for example. We can pick them up, put them in McAvoy’s fridge, or inside an air vent in his bedroom… and nothing will come out of it because the candles are useless (one could argue that they’re supposed to light the place where a certain object is hidden, but it’s quicker just to hover the cursor over the place, which will highlight the object). There’s this other very sharp and conspicuous object that you can even put inside the toilet, which will solve nothing. And if we go to the trouble of putting into motion the exact sequence of events that lead McAvoy’s wife to go to the bathroom and maybe find this object – a lot in Twelve Minutes would have been easier if the protagonist could just say the things we want – nothing noteworthy really happens. In other words, a lot in Twelve Minutes is designed to make us fail, to lead us to wrong theories about what we have to do, making the time loop constantly restart.

The problem is that this only inflates the game’s runtime – if we could guess the things we have to do right the first time around, Twelve Minutes wouldn’t last an hour – and makes experimentation frustrating. Because the loop restarts each time we fail, the game actually punishes us for trying our hypotheses based on the items we have – aka falling for its many mechanical red herrings – by making us watch the same scenes and hear the same dialogue over and over again.

In Majora’s Mask, each time Link goes back to the dawn of the first day, he doesn’t have to listen to the Mask Salesman’s speech again: the game restarts after that dialogue, so we can go right back to the adventure. That’s not the case with Twelve Minutes, where we have to watch the first scenes play out again and again, with little variation. We either hear the wife saying, “Best night ever, guess who made dessert?” or a very understandable, “Ok… rude,” if McAvoy pushes her away. The problem is that the game doesn’t even let us fast-forward the dialogue: we can just press a button to skip a line, but this means we have to do it line by line, making the process laborious when “save the player’s time” should have been this system’s purpose.

To add insult to injury, even the tiniest detail can make us fail, going back to the beginning of the loop and having to repeat everything to get to where we were. For example, later on in the game, Dafoe asks McAvoy for an item after a lengthy dialogue scene. If the protagonist has this object on hand, he gives it to Dafoe and the scene continues, but if he doesn’t have it, Dafoe beats him up, and the loop restarts, even though McAvoy knows where the object is and says he’s going to get it. So, why restart the loop here and make us rewatch the whole dialogue again and have to go to the trouble of making the events that lead to this dialogue happen one more time? Is Dafoe’s violent reaction so much more believable to warrant this waste of the player’s time? The answer is certainly “no”, and to make matters worse, the final plot twist even makes this kind of question of “is this character acting in a believable way” irrelevant.

In other words, we fail there just to restart the loop, padding the game’s length and increasing our frustration. And the game has a lot of these moments, where we fail because we did everything right except one tiny extremely arbitrary detail. This leads us to retry some of our theories based on the mechanical red herrings, sticking with these misleading objects because we believe that if we do just this thing differently, the plan will now work. But in the end, we are just wasting more of our time.

Twelve Minutes is much more interested in making us repeat the loop than making it feel new and refreshing each time. One could argue that this repetition is to make us feel the same frustration that McAvoy is feeling, but there’s a huge disconnection between his character and the player. We are not stuck in a time loop just like him, we are stuck with him.

First, there’s the matter that even though he’s not bound by the loop to repeat his actions and his words – like his wife and Dafoe are – the protagonist often repeats them nonetheless. Each time he listens to his wife say that she prepared dessert, he will give the same answer, and each time we make him interrupt her, he will do it by saying the exact same sentence. For us, this makes McAvoy much like the other characters. This is, of course, a limitation of the media – there’s just so much different dialogue a game can have – but it’s one which games like Majora’s Mask managed to circumvent by making their protagonists silent.

McAvoy is not silent and if he sounds like James McAvoy, that is his only redeeming quality. His character is so bland, so blank, so devoid of traits, that he could have very well have been silent: this actually would have increased his dialogue options – since they would not have to be dubbed by an expensive actor with a tight schedule – and make interacting with other characters more interesting. After all, one of the frustrating aspects of the game is that we have to deal with its arbitrary constraints: if we have to discover the sequence of events that make his wife go to the bathroom it’s only because the protagonist is simply unable to say to her, “Dear, please go to the bathroom.”

One of the first things we have to do, for example, is to discover a way to prevent McAvoy’s wife from disclosing his location in the apartment to Dafoe – and this can be considered a puzzle only because he’s unable to just go to her before Dafoe arrives and say “Dear, please, don’t rat me out.” The puzzles in the game – and the more outlandish things you have to do – exist only because of this limitation. McAvoy could have just gone to his wife and said “Dear, please turn off the lights and hide under the bed,” but no, he has to discover a ridiculously convoluted way to make her go to the bedroom with the lights out.

Even if we ignore the protagonist’s speech impairment, the puzzles can still be arbitrary. One of the first ones, for example, requires that Dafoe’s character do a certain action in one of the rooms, but he does this action only if McAvoy’s wife is in that room, and not if the protagonist is in there, but there’s no logical reason for this difference in behavior. The arbitrary nature of these “puzzles”, then, can make the act of failing them and having to rewatch the same things again and again and again and again – and again – infuriating. And there are even moments when the game “cheats”, bending the established rules to make us fail: Dafoe appears around the five-minute mark, but if we make McAvoy’s wife leave the apartment before that, he appears immediately, as if he were in the building’s lobby just waiting for his cue.

Character development isn’t Twelve Minute’s strongest suit either. McAvoy, for example, barely has anything to say of note to his wife that is not related to the problems at hand. They don’t seem to have personalities of their own, much less share a past history together. The scene where they dance in the living room is the only one in the game where it hints at this history together – it’s a rare moment of affection in a story centered around a relationship – but it’s still a shallow moment that limits itself to “we used to dance more together”, meaning they don’t anymore for whatever reason. Is their relationship not as strong as it was before? What are the reasons for this change? Are there conflicts between them or it’s a matter of the passage of time corroding their love? The game is not interested in these questions. Actually, Twelve Minutes doesn’t seem to care about its characters at all.

Take McAvoy’s wife, who is the worst example of this problem. She’s played by Daisy Ridley, but I decided to call her just “the wife” – precisely like the game – because Twelve Minutes is utterly uninterested in her. She likes to read, she has a dark secret, and that’s it about her. We are supposed to believe McAvoy and his wife love each other very much, but there’s no sort of trust or union between them. In the puzzles, she’s more often than not a problem the protagonist has to solve – and sometimes even violently. She never has a say on things, which are decided for her by either McAvoy or Dafoe. This is even worse during the ending, as McAvoy’s choice directly affects her, but her opinion on the matter is never asked or exposed.

The protagonist is not much better in terms of depth, but at least he has agency. In terms of development, he’s limited to the strange situation he’s in: instead of the time loop testing his character and revealing hidden, dormant, or surprising elements of his personality, it comprises everything he is. There’s no theme or internal conflict guiding the character for most of the game’s runtime, he’s the problem he has to solve and his personality is formed by the actions he has to take to solve it. The game advertises itself as being “about a man stuck in a time loop,” and, before the final twists, the protagonist is just that, a man, with no discernable traits besides his gender.

James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe are wonderful actors, but there’s only so much they can do with the material they’re given, especially when the “editing” also hinders their performances. There are very few dialogue options in the game, but they still contradict each other in terms of tone and content. McAvoy can end a line of questioning exasperated, while his wife is clearly angry, but the next conversation can immediately begin with both characters acting super calm, as if the previous discussion never happened. This is not an unusual problem in games, but the repetitive nature of the story and the small number of dialogue options make it much more pronounced here. It pulls us out of the game and can even make us laugh in inappropriate moments: after I made the protagonist do a horrible and extremely traumatizing thing, for example, McAvoy was in tears, with the actor giving a very emotional performance, but the loop restarted and the character unironically said the very same thing that he’d said in some of the previous restarts: “This is getting easier.”

The game’s general aesthetic makes no sense either. We see things from a top-down perspective, like observing rats in a maze, but the perspective should have been extremely personal instead – preferably in the first-person – to better match the psychological nature of the final twist. When we pause the game to use an item or press a button to skip a line, the game also assumes a cassette-tape aesthetic, as if we are watching a video… but this leads nowhere.

Finally, we have the ending, which is so nonsensical that it makes even Backbone seem cohesive, and that game’s ending is wild. Suffice to say that it errs by putting the focus on the psychological nature of a character that was until that point defined by the plot. And even though there was some bit of foreshadowing in the form of some objects of the house, it still feels like a cop-out, since the explanations offered are not only too farfetched but also dramatically meaningless, adding nothing to the characters and offering little to no resolution, especially concerning the troubled relationship between McAvoy’s wife and her father.

Twelve Minutes represents the worst kind of time loop stories, the one that mishandles the core element of the genre, making its repetition a boring and frustrating affair. With shallow characters, a nonsensical ending, arbitrary puzzles, and a plethora of problematic design choices, Twelve Minutes is a complete letdown.

August 31, 2021.