Twelve Minutes Is a Great Concept Spoiled by a Bad Ending

Note: The ending is not spoiled in this review.

A man arrives home to his apartment, where his wife awaits. She’s made dessert in light of the news she has to share. While sharing a slow, romantic dance in the kitchen, there’s a knock on the door. A detective enters and accuses the woman of murdering her father eight years ago. He zip-ties both husband and wife and, in an effort to extract information, begins strangling the man.

Fade to black.

A man arrives home to his apartment, where his wife awaits. She’s made dessert in light of the news she has to share. The man feels as if he’s lived this before. He’s stuck in a time loop and needs to find a way to break the cycle.

Annapurna Interactive

The premise is simple—you take the role of the husband, and whenever the clock runs out, you leave the apartment, or you get injured, the night begins anew. The apartment features just three rooms: a kitchen/living room, bathroom, and bedroom. It’s small but believably something you’d find in a high-rise in any major downtown area. It feels lived in, but there are some oddities, like no television and a radio on the windowsill, though there are smartphones. Presented in a top-down perspective, Twelve Minutes takes cues from old-school point-and-click adventures like Monkey Island and Sam & Max, and you scrounge the apartment for items to gather or combine to work towards your goal.

The size of the space works well; every interactable item feels like it could have a legitimate purpose and makes the player think about each, both as a standalone object and how it could be combined with others or how it may interact with a specific character. Will stashing something in this vent be useful? Is it the best use of my limited time to read the text messages on this cell phone? What items are simply red herrings?

Much like those old-school games, figuring out the exact combination of items or sequence of events needed to advance the plot sometimes requires a leap in logic; there was more than one occasion I hit a dead end for an extended period of time.

The game features an impressive Hollywood cast—the husband is voiced by James McAvoy, the wife by Daisy Ridley, and the detective by Willem Dafoe. Given the nature of the game, you’ll be hearing some of the same lines of dialogue over and over again. Thankfully, the developers were kind enough to include the ability to fast-forward with the click of the mouse. The script is competent, if somewhat bland, though the three do an admirable job in voicing it; Dafoe in particular is the standout among the trio.

Twelve Minutes is at times uncomfortable. Many scenes revolve around your wife being beaten or emotionally abused. In one scene, to gain information to advance the plot in the next loop, I had to hide in the closet and watch her get murdered. Something to keep in mind if you prefer not to play games featuring such content.

One thing I truly cannot abide, however, is the ending. The ending is stupid. It’s illogical. It’s dumb. I won’t spoil anything, but it is so out of left field all I could do was furrow my brow as the credits rolled. I’m a proponent of the journey being more important than the destination in video games, but this left a sour taste in my mouth. Fiction involving time travel or time loops is often difficult to end satisfactorily, and this misses it by a country mile.

For the record, I think Twelve Minutes is a great experiment. I love the time-loop premise and the detective work, then carrying that new knowledge into each loop and racing to get things done. I would certainly play another game in the same style. It took me about six hours to finish, and I enjoyed almost all of that time. The ending, however, verges on torpedoing the entire experience.

Twelve Minutes is available on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.