From The Legend of Zelda to Final Fantasy and more recent fare Returnal, the concept of timeloops in video games is hardly new. Indeed, the core tenet of the medium is often one of try, try and try again; even if the method of delivery is not as overt as starring in your very own Groundhog Day.
But the fascinating loop of Twelve Minutes, a devilishly compact thriller from first-time director Luis Antonio, is unusual to say the least. The titular timespan takes place entirely within the confines of a non-descript apartment in an unspecified US city, with you playing the role of a man returning home to his wife after work. Over the course of the next 12 minutes, the couple settle down for some dessert and the wife announces she is pregnant with their first child. But the picture of marital bliss is interrupted as a man –claiming to be a police officer– bursts into the apartment, accuses your wife of murder and handcuffs you both until things get wildly out of hand and the cop strangles you to death.
You are then coughed back to the moment you enter the apartment –perfectly alive and memory intact– and the time starts again. You then must use the knowledge of previous loops to try and stop the murder and discover the truth behind the startling accusation.
Twelve Minutes is a classic point-and-click adventure game at heart, with you scouring the apartment for different clues and tools to change the outcome of each loop: a kitchen knife, a damaged light-switch, a discarded phone. But its aesthetic and tone is overtly Hitchcockian, with a voyeuristic top-down view into the dimly lit apartment as if you were peering into a doll’s house with the roof off. It is a game that can quickly burrow into the mind, as you make small adjustments to what you say and what you do to uncover even a nugget of new information that might come in handy in the next loop.
