https://www.cybersport.ru/games/articles/chto-delat-esli-zhena-tebe-vret-a-ty-pryacheshsya-v-chulane-rasskazhem-v-obzore-twelve-minutes

Open up, it’s the police

The fashion for time loops in popular culture was set by the charming Bill Murray in the comedy Groundhog Day. After that there were blockbusters like “Source Code” and “Edge of the Future” and even black comedies like “Happy Day of Death”. The concept, in fact, is the same everywhere: the hero must correct some critical situation or change his life for the better, and until he does this, the events of the day will repeat. In this regard, Twelve Minutes does not deviate from the usual patterns, but it has an interesting feature: the repeated time period is as limited as possible. The overall loop is 12 minutes long, but most of the game will actually be around five minutes long.

And that time-loop condition really did the title well. Your character will not be able to learn playing the piano or a couple of new languages, like Bill Murray did, although a reference to this will be in one of the dialogues. Instead, he needs to work out a plan as soon as possible to save himself and his wife from the strange cop and, possibly, reveal the biggest lie of his life. The time limit creates an oppressive atmosphere that makes the first few attempts really nervous. You just found an opportunity to unscrew the ventilation grill or found a mobile phone that allows you to dial any number, but the villain, as always punctually, knocks out the door again and starts to choke you.

Solving puzzles in such conditions adds drive and interest. A certain sense of realism appears: you have to frantically run around the apartment, poke around in every corner in search of any improvised objects that can help, as if a knock on the door is about to be heard not in the game, but in real life. With this, Twelve Minutes certainly draws you in at first and immerses you in the process, not allowing you to tear yourself away from the monitor and making you really shudder when the time before the X moment runs out.

Knife, flower and two glasses

Twelve Minutes is a top-down point-and-click in which you have to collect items and use them within the same apartment. Moreover, each of the items is not tied to any specific task, as is usually the case in quests. This opens up a lot of creativity and you start looking for the best use for your spoon and glass (and yes, both can be useful). Most of the fun is with a knife: you can, for example, smash a flower pot, open a ventilation hatch, try to carry out an extreme repair of a light switch, or even test your wife for strength.

The set of items available for use in the game is small, and you won’t have to puzzled over its use for a long time. But this is not bad, considering that the game itself will not tell you how and what to do, but will completely rely on our ingenuity. Due to the lack of tooltips like “Press the G button. Now. Yes, right now! ” or glowing objects that you can interact with, Twelve Minutes is very addicting at first. You start thinking, memorizing NPC behavior patterns, predicting possible events and collecting pieces of information in your head into a single puzzle. And most importantly, there are also false paths in the game that do not lead to anything, but only take our time. Thanks to this, the level of realism rises sharply, but not for long …

Turn on the light, but don’t open the closet, please

Perhaps the main problem of the game from a gameplay point of view is its scripting. Twelve Minutes initially attracted me with the developers’ stories about freedom of choice and the need to connect logic to solve riddles. There is just a problem: the game is as linear as possible. You can literally at the very first attempts to find a way to neutralize the policeman, but it will not work until you supposedly find other clues and open the necessary dialogue phrases. You figured out how the characters work, set up events to succeed, but – wow! – The NPC suddenly changes the pattern of behavior and destroys the plan. But by opening new dialogues, you can perform the same sequence of actions, but already come to a positive result. As if there is no smell of freedom of action here. It’s like in school: a problem does not have to be solved correctly and quickly – the main thing is that the solution should be like a teacher’s. Developers in this case are the same strict mathematician.

In a movie about time loops, such a linear approach would look logical, but in a game it can turn into absurdity. You can immediately find the cache, but the game will hint to you: “Dear friend, you should have learned about the cache from the dialogue, so let’s try again, huh?”

It is clear that the developers cannot think of thousands of different combinations of actions and implement them in the game. But imagine, you add a knife to the game and a villain who should come, and make the hero a man of athletic build. Is there really no option in which he can prepare and kill the intruder? This will not lead to victory, but the player will at least receive satisfaction and make sure that murder is not an option in this case. Instead, you, like me, can spend 20 minutes comically trying to catch the villain by surprise or attack him with a knife when he is busy tying up your wife, but instead of a murder scene, see how the hero, standing with a knife, will amusely throw up his hands and repeat “Sir” until he is noticed and laid with one blow.

Moreover, the main character from the squishy, ​​who is hiding in the closet and spying on how his wife is being killed, it is quite possible to downgrade to a piñata. After all, a cop can lay us down, even if he is tied up, and we have a gun. It just punches our foreheads gently into our heads, and the loop of suffering begins anew.

Sir, sir, sir … Why are you hitting my wife, sir?

As stressful and exciting the first attempts were, the last ones become just as tiring. The monotony of basic tasks that must be performed over and over again in order to complete just one new action or utter a new remark at the end greatly reduces the dynamics of what is happening. In films, such moments can be curiously played with the help of editing or even omitted and the viewer’s attention can be focused on new events and actions of the hero, in Twelve Minutes we will scroll through the same set of actions to the end. For convenience, closer to the final, the developers will only add a saving remark in the dialogue with his wife, which will save us from several obligatory gestures.

Now add to this the fact that closer to the end you will experience several turns of the loop, in which your character will not be involved at all. On the screen, two minor characters will communicate about things that you already know. And the protagonist at this moment can only play the role of a dummy, who pokes his head against the wall and repeats “Sir, sir, sir …” when trying to somehow interact with other characters.

Oh, it seems to be the voices of James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe

The use of James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe in the voice acting was a good marketing ploy, allowing developers and the media to include the names of famous actors next to the title. However, in fact, I did not even remember about them during the passage. The voice acting in Twelve Minutes … no, you can’t say it’s bad, it’s just there. However, instead of McAvoy, there could have been any other voice actor, and it would hardly have gotten worse. Dialogues in the game are needed in order to move the plot (moreover, it is to move, not reveal), but they do not have a serious emotional and psychological impact on the player. There will be no heartfelt conversations that could cause goosebumps, so I personally did not care who utters the phrase “Sir, sorry, sir” for the 150th time – McEvoy or Alexander Nevsky (although, perhaps, the second option would be interesting to watch) …

When I wanted to be young Nolan, but turned out to be the late Shyamalan

It is difficult to tell the story of Twelve Minutes without spoiling the experience of the game. Although the scriptwriters themselves did an excellent job with the latter. The general storyline for most of the title seems to be quite understandable and unpretentious, it does not make you constantly change opinions about the characters or doubt any events. It seems that we are facing an easy detective about where a lie can lead. “It’s not pretty, but soundly and logically cut,” you say a couple of minutes before the final. But, apparently, this was not enough for the scriptwriters. Therefore, the studio decided to amaze gamers with an incredible twist that turns the whole story upside down at the end.

Such techniques are really loved by both gamers and movie viewers, it is not for nothing that the search query “movies with unexpected endings” is always in trend. However, these screenplay tricks work when they are intelligently woven into the story told earlier. If bread crumbs are scattered in a work in the form of hints and half-hints, according to which, returning to the beginning, you can really put together an integral picture – the one to which the plot eventually comes. Or, to put it another way, if after the film you are ready to say: “Oh, this is how it was, how could I not immediately understand,” then this is great. Such things really leave a strong impression and are remembered for a long time.

Or you can take a simpler path, which the creators of Twelve Minutes have chosen: add a very big event to the finale, which, however, does not reveal the story otherwise, but simply gives a “wow effect”. The first minutes it even works, but after a while you substitute new introductions into the existing story and realize that the puzzle is not going to be assembled. And most importantly, the explanation given by the game, presenting the new rules, is so vulgar and hackneyed that it immediately causes rejection and disappointment.

By the way, remember the line about “five minutes” from the beginning of the review? It was not in the legendary song of Gurchenko from “Carnival Night”: the phrase “Is it a lot or a little?” appeared later in the usual commercial advertising. This is the case with Twelve Minutes – instead of a philosophical dramatic detective story, you are given chewing gum for a couple of hours with the taste of an unexpected twist.