The promising indie debut has failed in absolutely all of its endeavors.
Similar in spirit
Usually, games created by loners want to be treated with condescension, not to judge too harshly. However, when a reputable publishing house stands behind the developer, Hollywood stars are invited to the main roles, and the game itself tries its best to evoke associations with the classics of Hitchcock, Kubrick and Fincher, you involuntarily begin to take it more seriously. However, serious criticism Twelve minutes, alas, does not stand up.
An unnamed man, even in the credits indicated only as “husband”, returns home, where an equally unnamed wife is waiting for him with a surprise: over dessert, she informs her husband about pregnancy. They show mercy, dance, but then a stranger suddenly knocks on the door, who introduces himself as a policeman. He knits both spouses, accuses his wife of murdering his own father and demands to know where she hides the watch she inherited from the deceased. And in order to untie the tongue of the captive, the guardian of law and order strangles her husband to death.
Suddenly bam – and you again find yourself on the threshold of the apartment. Time has turned back, the wife is still unaware of anything, and you know everything that will happen in the next few minutes. Will it help change fate? Practice shows that it is not very good. The betrothed does not believe in time travel, reacts aggressively to inquiries about her father’s death, and does not want to talk about watches either. A locked door won’t stop a cop. Even if you hide in a closet and stealthily attack him, armed with a knife, he will prevail. Trying to leave the apartment will only restart the loop and return you to the beginning of the loop. How to be? How to get out of the situation? What really happened?
The hero cannot hide under the bed
Finding the answer to these questions will have to be dealt with during the entire (rather modest) timing of Twelve Minutes. Unfortunately, the whole gameplay boils down to a banal trigger hunting: a search for a specific sequence of actions that will allow you to get more information and slightly change the events of each next loop. This is done in the traditional point-and-click format, and the hero has an absolute minimum of opportunities: pick up items in the inventory and combine them with each other or with characters. Well, choosing topics in dialogs is exactly the topic, and not the replicas themselves. Even if you, the player, have already understood something about what is happening, it is not at all a fact that the hero has drawn the same conclusions. It is imperative to find the only correct trigger for the next event, otherwise the story will not get off the ground.
For example, impressing your wife with a thorough description of everything that happens in the next five minutes will not work – she will be convinced only by what you know about the prepared surprise (and this will not be enough). Anticipating a sudden change in the weather, a song on the radio, a dessert in the fridge, and an exploding switch in the bedroom will not affect her opinion in any way, even if you list them all in order. The only way to move forward is to climb into the closet as soon as you arrive at the apartment, even before your wife notices that you have returned home. In words, this may sound simple, but how many fruitless attempts to find this particular solution from many others would you have to make without prompting?
However, even having found out where the mysterious clock lies, it is physically difficult to find it on the first try. In continuous darkness, the ventilation still needs to be seen
Thinking about the next step will be even more difficult. Having collected all the necessary information, you can still easily run into the time limit. Or screw up the sequence of actions with one mistake and go to the beginning to do the same thing again. Movies would have saved this situation by editing, other games by saving. Twelve Minutes insists on repetition, although it is not good for her, but to her detriment: the already artless adventure gameplay turns into a boring routine, and unsuccessful attempts to reason logically cause only frustration.
Despite the relative freedom of action, the plot develops linearly: until you grasp one trigger, the next will not work
In other aspects, the game is also extremely poor. Animated motion capture character models are reminiscent of early parts The sims… Daisy Ridley does not play in her traditional manner at all, and from her yawning “What?” Heard for the tenth time, I want to turn off the sound. James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe are also not enthusiastic, but here the complaint is more likely not to them, but to the text that they have to read.
The main characters are demonstratively faceless, they have no way of life and no history of life together. Most of the time, the husband is simply the avatar of the player, and the wife only causes antipathy – both by voice acting and by constant aggression towards a loved one. All this does not really motivate to suffer cycle after cycle and to restore the full picture of events bit by bit in order to get to the next plot twist. Moreover, these turns themselves turn into a bunch of hackneyed stamps – but this is no longer possible to talk about without spoilers, so read on at your own peril and risk.
SPOILERS!
The policeman wants to get the watch to sell it and pay for his daughter’s treatment with the proceeds, but his actions also have an ulterior motive: revenge. The cop appears to be a close friend of his wife’s father, and most of the timing is spent on finding out the circumstances of the latter’s death. At first, the wife really confesses to the murder, but then it turns out that her half-brother is to blame, about whom, of course, no one had said anything before. The policeman mentions the mother of the mysterious parricide, and then the main character suddenly realizes that … the parricide is himself. That is, all this time he was married to his own sister, albeit a half-step. The title “Directed by Robert B. Weide” would have come in very handy here, but alas, Twelve Minutes is extremely serious.
After this revelation, you play with strength. All brothers and sisters to each other, comfortable amnesia made the character forget exactly what is needed in the plot. Ugh! But the game does not stop there and throws up the next surprise: in fact, everything happened in the hero’s imagination, while in reality he was quite alive, not killed by anyone, his father summoned him to a serious conversation. That is, to all of the above cliches is also added “the dream of a dog dying of oxygen starvation.” The fact that everything was kind of pretend devalues the previous events of the game and raises many questions: for example, about the daughter of a police officer, who has no place in a new interpretation of the story.
Usually, excursions into the fantasies, dreams or subconsciousness of the heroes reveal their inner world, allegorically tell about the problems that gnaw at them, but the heroes of Twelve Minutes have nothing to reveal. Even with a full knowledge of the context, everything that happens comes down to “Dad came and broke off all the incest” – and this secret had to, gritting his teeth, wade through dozens of time loops!
Pleased
- intimacy is always good.
Upset
- gameplay consists of trigger hunting with endless repetition of the same actions;
- the animations are cheap and Daisy Ridley can’t play;
- the plot offends with its stupidity and banality.
How we played
What: key provided by the publisher.
On what: RS.
how many: 3 hours.
Achievement of the editorial office
“Well, it can’t …”
Guess the essence of the main plot twist, but refuse to believe that everything is so bad.
About localization
Subtitles have been translated into Russian. Not without errors, but the quality of the original script is so low that it doesn’t matter at all.
Verdict
Twelve Minutes is intriguing with its concept, but fatally disappointing with its performance. This is a story-driven game in which the plot is categorically bad, and the gameplay does not offer anything worthwhile. The blind search for the next trigger to continue the plot is the scourge of most point-and-click adventure games, and Twelve Minutes has become its next victim.
