This review contains spoilers
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(100%/All Achievements Review/Essay)
Twelve Minutes is a top-down point-and-click game that plays like an interactive movie. As advertised, the main premise of the story is that you're a man who's being forced to live through a sickening but sometimes endearing purgatorial-esque time loop wherein a cop comes to the door of the apartment that you and your wife live in and accuses her of murdering somebody; that somebody being her biological father. As you go along with the narrative, you begin to learn more about your wife's past, the "cop"'s background, and yourself. It initially escalates from a murder mystery thriller to something much darker than you would be able to predict or imagine. There are themes of an affair, hypnotization, incest, family, & plenty of symbolism indicating these things all around you, which are manifested in the paintings and objects around your living space. All of this reminds me a lot of both simulation theory and the Sims, and sometimes it feels like the husband knows he's in a video game.
Even though the playstyle would seem as if it would be repetitive, it rarely feels that way. There are always new things to learn about your situation by exploring your environment, along with the items and decorations placed in and around it. Throughout my playthrough, I only encountered 2 to 3 glitches where I'd both clip through my wife and the blood on the ground, my wife had repeated herself like a broken robot, and I had gotten scene locked, but it wasn't detrimental to my view of the game in any way, and I quickly forgot about these things. No matter how biased we are in our opinions towards things, nothing is ever absolutely perfect; and imperfections show sincerity. Only one of these bugs was somewhat game-breaking.
In other news, I think the sound design of the game is masterfully done. The scores can induce anxiety, appreciation, and many other emotions. I really recommend turning on spatial sound to hear how realistically the thunder, rain, and lightning reverberate against the panes of your windows. The graphics are practically perfect except for the fluidity behavior of the liquid substances in-game, such as blood and water, and clearly, you don't just clip through people in real life. I think it appears a lot like whatever engine the Sims 6 would be advertised with.
The game does get confusing in its attempts to guide you through the story without holding your hand, along with other aspects like the father and the cop sharing the same voice actor. It can be fairly frustrating to figure out what your objective is without looking up a walkthrough, which I had to do at some points, especially with attaining multiple endings. Some actions you're able to carry out make you believe that you'd get a trophy for it, but overall the achievements are quite convoluted and you'd likely need outside help to 100% Twelve Minutes. Regardless, I still feel like the first half of the story is very captivating until the second twist, and then it becomes anticlimactic.
(Spoilers ahead.)
So, you eventually find out that your wife genuinely believes that she did murder her father, but this is not the case despite how it looks. It is heavily implied that the "cop" isn't even an actual cop, and is in all reality a man who knew her father personally. His motives seem simultaneously altruistic and nefarious, seeing as his intentions are to kill you both out of vengeance, take the family heirloom, and auction it off to pay for his daughter's cancer treatments. Some of the loops show you endings where nobody is hurt, some let you drug and/or kill everybody. You can interrogate both your wife and the "cop" (after incapacitating him by shooting him in the leg), you can look through both of their phone messages, and the paintings along the spaces of the walls show premonitions of the future conclusions.
In the second and last plot twist, you begin to realize that you are the one who killed your wife's father, and you're also the product of his affair with the nanny; making you and your wife half-siblings. Obviously, this is a sickening realization, considering you already have one child, plus another on the way. Everyone here is guilty in some way, your wife's sin being both lying to you about her past & shooting her father. Your sin is that you know that you're blood-related and yet you continue to either keep living with this thought silently or eventually tell your wife after it's too late (although there is an ending where you tell the father that you won't continue to pursue his daughter, leaving you with a clean slate and loneliness), as well as the fact that you're a murderer; albeit an accidental one since you were acting in self-defense. The cop's wrongdoing is evident as well; he's pretending to be an authoritative figure and in some parts he mentions that he doesn't even care if you and the wife are innocent or guilty, planning to sacrifice you both anyways to save his daughter Bumblebee.
Altogether, many of the themes are straight-up depraved and I sometimes wonder why the game developers chose to put these concepts in, the game is intriguing all throughout and I really did enjoy playing it, save for some of the lackluster endings. I feel as if the second twist was kind of unnecessary, and the game would've done a better job if it had ended with you both having a mutual understanding with the fake cop.
(Spoiler ending, continue here!)
Anyways, even though I had a few small qualms with the game, I wholeheartedly recommend it. I had waited for this game to come out for a long time, and I'm not unimpressed at all with my experience. The game can siphon you in for about a few hours or more if you want to get every achievement, but I loved playing it the entire time. I don't really understand or agree with the bad reviews at all, and I believe this game is worthy of anybody's playtime.
(100%/All Achievements Review/Essay)
Twelve Minutes is a top-down point-and-click game that plays like an interactive movie. As advertised, the main premise of the story is that you're a man who's being forced to live through a sickening but sometimes endearing purgatorial-esque time loop wherein a cop comes to the door of the apartment that you and your wife live in and accuses her of murdering somebody; that somebody being her biological father. As you go along with the narrative, you begin to learn more about your wife's past, the "cop"'s background, and yourself. It initially escalates from a murder mystery thriller to something much darker than you would be able to predict or imagine. There are themes of an affair, hypnotization, incest, family, & plenty of symbolism indicating these things all around you, which are manifested in the paintings and objects around your living space. All of this reminds me a lot of both simulation theory and the Sims, and sometimes it feels like the husband knows he's in a video game.
Even though the playstyle would seem as if it would be repetitive, it rarely feels that way. There are always new things to learn about your situation by exploring your environment, along with the items and decorations placed in and around it. Throughout my playthrough, I only encountered 2 to 3 glitches where I'd both clip through my wife and the blood on the ground, my wife had repeated herself like a broken robot, and I had gotten scene locked, but it wasn't detrimental to my view of the game in any way, and I quickly forgot about these things. No matter how biased we are in our opinions towards things, nothing is ever absolutely perfect; and imperfections show sincerity. Only one of these bugs was somewhat game-breaking.
In other news, I think the sound design of the game is masterfully done. The scores can induce anxiety, appreciation, and many other emotions. I really recommend turning on spatial sound to hear how realistically the thunder, rain, and lightning reverberate against the panes of your windows. The graphics are practically perfect except for the fluidity behavior of the liquid substances in-game, such as blood and water, and clearly, you don't just clip through people in real life. I think it appears a lot like whatever engine the Sims 6 would be advertised with.
The game does get confusing in its attempts to guide you through the story without holding your hand, along with other aspects like the father and the cop sharing the same voice actor. It can be fairly frustrating to figure out what your objective is without looking up a walkthrough, which I had to do at some points, especially with attaining multiple endings. Some actions you're able to carry out make you believe that you'd get a trophy for it, but overall the achievements are quite convoluted and you'd likely need outside help to 100% Twelve Minutes. Regardless, I still feel like the first half of the story is very captivating until the second twist, and then it becomes anticlimactic.
(Spoilers ahead.)
So, you eventually find out that your wife genuinely believes that she did murder her father, but this is not the case despite how it looks. It is heavily implied that the "cop" isn't even an actual cop, and is in all reality a man who knew her father personally. His motives seem simultaneously altruistic and nefarious, seeing as his intentions are to kill you both out of vengeance, take the family heirloom, and auction it off to pay for his daughter's cancer treatments. Some of the loops show you endings where nobody is hurt, some let you drug and/or kill everybody. You can interrogate both your wife and the "cop" (after incapacitating him by shooting him in the leg), you can look through both of their phone messages, and the paintings along the spaces of the walls show premonitions of the future conclusions.
In the second and last plot twist, you begin to realize that you are the one who killed your wife's father, and you're also the product of his affair with the nanny; making you and your wife half-siblings. Obviously, this is a sickening realization, considering you already have one child, plus another on the way. Everyone here is guilty in some way, your wife's sin being both lying to you about her past & shooting her father. Your sin is that you know that you're blood-related and yet you continue to either keep living with this thought silently or eventually tell your wife after it's too late (although there is an ending where you tell the father that you won't continue to pursue his daughter, leaving you with a clean slate and loneliness), as well as the fact that you're a murderer; albeit an accidental one since you were acting in self-defense. The cop's wrongdoing is evident as well; he's pretending to be an authoritative figure and in some parts he mentions that he doesn't even care if you and the wife are innocent or guilty, planning to sacrifice you both anyways to save his daughter Bumblebee.
Altogether, many of the themes are straight-up depraved and I sometimes wonder why the game developers chose to put these concepts in, the game is intriguing all throughout and I really did enjoy playing it, save for some of the lackluster endings. I feel as if the second twist was kind of unnecessary, and the game would've done a better job if it had ended with you both having a mutual understanding with the fake cop.
(Spoiler ending, continue here!)
Anyways, even though I had a few small qualms with the game, I wholeheartedly recommend it. I had waited for this game to come out for a long time, and I'm not unimpressed at all with my experience. The game can siphon you in for about a few hours or more if you want to get every achievement, but I loved playing it the entire time. I don't really understand or agree with the bad reviews at all, and I believe this game is worthy of anybody's playtime.