Twelve minutes7/7/2023 ![]() ![]() Even within the luxury of some different endings, there is one canonical ending and one way to progress through each step of the overarching puzzle, and once you clock that there's much less incentive to experiment. It's clear, though, that there's a correct way to go about things. "There's a bunch of very good, clever detail, with new things popping out at you as you explore." The writing accounts for you trying things in different ways or in a different order, so you'll encounter different bits of dialogue or events as a reward for experimenting. There are sound cues, like footsteps in the flat above, that you subconsciously note as time indicators. After a while you realise Ridley's incidental throwaways as you potter around - "We need to clean out that closet" or remarking on the unexpected thunder - are subtle nudges in the right direction. The top-down view makes you feel curiously voyeuristic, and works well with the pointy-clicky controls. There's a bunch of very good, clever detail besides the cast, with new things popping out at you as you explore and try to solve your odd problem. I'm less convinced by Ridley, who doesn't quite hit the theatrical exaggeration you need if the audience is floating above you and can't see your face - but arguably she has the least juicy material to work with out of the three. Willem Dafoe himself is also great since his default position is being Willem Dafoe at a hundred miles an hour whatever the situation, whether that's staging a suicide or pleading as he bleeds out on the floor. McAvoy is my favourite, with his muttered expletives at cop Dafoe whenever he resets. The cast do a good job making the weirdness convincing. Like seriously, this game gets super weird about half way through, and I appreciated that about it. But once you figure out how to get him down, there's more to do, and the plot will twist in front of you in ways you don't expect. ![]() Objective one is stop the unstoppable Willem, who may as well be the Terminator when you first encounter him. Everything happens at a set time and you have to work around that, so when Twelve Minutes is at its best, you feel like George Clooney in a very specific and weird kind of heist movie. It's hard to talk about most of Twelve Minutes without spoiling it, because it's a very tight little piece of narrative clockwork. Luckily, every time you are murdered by Willem, or even try and walk out of your flat, or burn out the 12 minutes, you start the loop all over again. You play a man voiced by James McAvoy who comes home for a nice evening with his Daisy Ridley wife, only for a Willem Dafoe policeman to burst in, zip tie you both, and strangle you to death for objecting to these circumstances. Nevertheless, this is the challenge presented to you in the puzzle game Twelve Minutes. ![]() 12 minutes would seem like a luxurious amount of time in many contexts, but when you have that amount of time to incapacitate a cop, untangle a murder and escape a time loop, all from your one-bedroom flat, it turns out it's quite short. If a stranger is staring at you on a train, however, unblinking and silent, then you realise that two minutes is, in fact, an eternity. If you're told you've got two minutes to put away the washing then it doesn't feel like any time at all. Twelve Minutes' time loop puzzle is layered and weird, but its short time limit doesn't find the sweet spot between tense and frustrating.
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