Twelve Minutes: Interactive time loop thriller in preview

Twelve Minutes

Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe - what sounds like the cast of the next big Hollywood blockbuster is actually the cast of one of the most exciting indie projects of this year: the time warp thriller Twelve Minutes. Already announced at PAX East 2015, it should actually appear in winter 2020. But creative director Luis Antonio decided to take a few more months for the final fine-tuning and to leave eager fans out in the rain.

Table of contents

1 Nothing new about the release 2 Try again, try again 3 Slimmed-down Point & Click 4 More film than game 5 A horror without end Anyway: We now had the chance to watch new gameplay scenes from Twelve Minutes as part of an [email protected] presentation and those responsible with our most burning ones Questions to hole up. First and foremost, of course: When will the thing finally appear? We summarize impressions and answers in this preview.

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Nothing new about the release

The bad news right up front: Luis Antonio didn't want to answer the most important question - despite intensive pleading and begging. The release of Twelve Minutes remains a well-kept secret. "We are in the last acts of development," the Portuguese merely revealed. At the moment they are still working a little on animations and audio recordings, and QA testing has already started. It is therefore expected to be published within the next few months. Versions for the PC as well as the Xbox One and Xbox Series S / X are planned. The title will also be available in Game Pass right at the launch.

In terms of play, Twelve Minutes can best be described as a point & click adventure: You explore the apartment, interact with objects and have dialogues. Source: Annapurna Interactive On the other hand, they were a little more open-hearted in other aspects. With the help of a longer gameplay demo, we were finally explained in more detail what exactly needs to be done in Twelve Minutes. So far we only got to see render trailers that conveyed style and mood well, but only partially revealed how the fun actually works.

As a reminder: The indie thriller puts you in the role of a man caught in the eponymous, twelve-minute time loop. It actually starts very edifying. For the dessert of your romantic candlelight dinner, you will find out that your wife is pregnant. But then it goes steadily downwards. First you have to watch a cop break into your apartment and accuse your wife of murdering her father. If you try to arrest her, the situation escalates completely. There is a scuffle that first costs you, but then also your wife and your unborn child. Well, at least if you play your cards wrong.

Try again, try again

The highlight and Twelve Minutes is: After every death or after twelve minutes, your vicious circle begins front. The time of day, the condition of your apartment, the memory of your wife - everything is reset to zero, only you and your main character are allowed to keep your collected knowledge and try to use it to your advantage next time. For example, you can try to hide in the dark bathroom with a knife and surprise the intruder. Or you can try to cover your partner with the existence of your never-ending nightmare by giving her early warning of the arrival of the police. The title offers an almost limitless selection of different paths and branches, through which you can create your very own gaming experience.

Incidentally, there are no right or wrong decisions. Aside from the initial tutorial, the game never tells you what to do. It also doesn't give you a specific goal or push you in a certain direction. The attraction and Twelve Minutes is much more the joy of experimenting, finding connections, collecting and interpreting experience. It's like a never-ending series of trial and error experiments, in the course of which you and your character always learn something new. Because: Nothing that you experience in-game is unimportant. "Things you discover during your first loop will still be relevant in the last loop," reveals Creative Director Antonio.

Knowledge is power: while the world around you is being reset, your character retains all of his Experience from previous loops. You can use them to your advantage. Source: Annapurna Interactive

Slimmed-down Point & Click

In terms of play, the whole thing can best be described as a kind of point & click adventure. You follow what is happening from a top-down perspective and you can use the mouse to give commands to your main character, who has not yet been named. With one click he interacts with the environment, picks up small objects and combines them with one another. A small inventory bar at the top of the screen helps with this. For example, you can grab a cup, fill it with water at the sink, and then put it in front of your wife to drink. The world then reacts dynamically to your actions and opens up new dialog options for you, for example.

Unfortunately, these are not exactly subtly integrated into the game. Possible questions and answers are displayed almost full-screen and then selected with the cursor. On the console, the whole thing works with the D-pad, the inventory is then on the shoulder buttons, navigated with the left stick. This ensures simple, accessible operation. "People who are less experienced with video games often have a harder time coordinating," explains Antonio. This was taken into account when designing the game.

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More film than game

The term "game" is a bit misleading anyway. Due to the rather limited possibilities for action, the makers prefer to speak of an "interactive experience", a kind of chamber game that can be driven in a desired direction. The staging of Twelve Minutes also fits in with this: There are only three main characters, only three rooms in which the entire event takes place - the bathroom, the living / dining room including the kitchen and the bedroom. This constellation ensures an enormous intimacy and intensity, as we know it from, for example, The Twelve Jurors or Cocktail for a Corpse. Stanley Kubrick was also obviously inspired - beautifully visible on the carpet in the hallway, the pattern of which was taken one-to-one from The Shining.

Twelve Minutes uses a top-down perspective. So the characters' faces cannot be seen. This makes the setting even more important. Source: Annapurna Interactive In view of this cinematic presentation, the successful game with scenery, characters and pointed lighting, it's just a shame that Twelve Minutes seems a little rough and unpolished in other places. Especially the animations in our gameplay demo somehow seemed a bit out of round. Characters took weird pauses when walking or sitting down instead of making a fluid movement. Figures lying on the ground were simply run through instead of stepping over them. When one of the participants started the stranglehold, his legs flew wildly around in the very best Ragdoll fashion. Of course, this could also be due to the fact that we saw a slightly older version of the game in which not all motion capture recordings were available.

In addition, the smaller flaws are made all the more successful by the soundtrack balanced. The star ensemble around Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe, who already had his first video game experience with Beyond: Two Souls, brilliantly masters the challenge that arises from the bird's eye view chosen. The actors manage to bring the characters to life even without a third dimension, without the use of any facial expressions. All emotions are conveyed by voice and body language alone.

A horror without end

And they lived happily ever after. There will probably not be such a traditional happy ending in Twelve Minutes. Source: Annapurna Interactive This is particularly noteworthy as Twelve Minutes originally had no voice acting at all. The dialogues should actually take place in text form at the top of the screen. Only through the partnership with Microsoft and Annapurna Interactive, or the film division Annapurna Pictures, was the project able to grow and attract big names. A deal that was definitely worth it, as it takes the 16 to 20-hour drama to a completely new level.

Although this time is only a rough guide. It is true that the loops in Twelve Minutes are comparatively short: They are not 24 hours that you have to keep a record of and the restart of which seems like agony every time. But they can be repeated almost infinitely often. After all, how do you put an end to something that never ends? "Films are linear media in which you at some point reach a point where the experience is over," Antonio explains in an interview. "But games don't have this kind of limitation." Accordingly, the final of Twelve Minutes looks a little different than what players might imagine. "There will come a moment when you say to yourself: I'm done, this seems like a satisfactory conclusion to me," said Antonio. However, there is no literal game-over-screen where the game stops and the credits run. So it is entirely up to you when you have reached the best possible outcome of the story.