Whether the husband is battling the insanity of being stuck in an endless loop, the wife is lovingly offering a dessert she prepared for the sentimental evening, or the cop is threatening and shouting, the performances usually suck the player directly into the distressing tale. Each character plays their role very well, and most lines hit home. Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe is the voice of the dangerous cop. James McAvoy is the protagonist of 12 Minutes and Daisy Ridley plays the caring wife with a possible tragic and twisted background. The voice acting of this perplexing story is very strong. The communication between the star-studded cast of 12 Minutes is where the story is mainly told. Players will use dialogue to gather information, and the more clues that are uncovered - both from finding things around the apartment and from talking during various loops - the more new conversation branches will be revealed. Because of the overall smart loop design, it does not feel overly unfair (unless there comes a time when the player actually gets stuck in a loop or two).Īlong with searching for clues, the biggest element of the game is dialogue. With any game where there is a timer that resets the clock (like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask), the time can almost become one of the enemies. However, in later loops, because the character now has new information at his fingertips, the player can prove they are in a loop in mere moments. This takes multiple steps to do and is quite involved. For example, at a very early point, the husband needs to prove to the wife that he is indeed in a time loop. However, in the next loop, the husband will remember this and apply this to his questioning, reasoning, etc. One set of tasks in a time loop might take up the entire twelve minutes, and players may barely get everything accomplished within the time limit. But the feeling of being stuck in a time loop is exactly how the husband likely feels in-game, so perhaps developer Luis Antonio was trying to convey that emotion.Ī big positive to 12 Minutes is how it handles its time loop design. In general, 12 Minutes can be very complicated at times. It can be very frustrating to be stuck in the same time loop over and over because an item was handed to the wife too early or the husband had to look at something before handing it to someone else. However, there are other tasks that are extremely specific and can feel almost broken. Some 12 Minutes tasks can be completed with multiple tools or in a couple of different ways. Each room tells its own story and is important in one way or another, although the game is certainly tricky, as players might want a few tips for 12 Minutes from time to time when stuck. The puzzles themselves are more about discovery and understanding than a true definition of a puzzle-genre video game. The player roams about the apartment like a point-and-click adventure, although with an Xbox controller it does feel like using a mouse would have been more natural. Talking to the wife and letting her know that the player is in a time loop will not help at all if the player has not yet come up with reasons to prove that they are in a loop, for example. RELATED: 12 Minutes: Can You Kill the Cop?In trying to figure out what is going on, the player must take full advantage of each loop to find clues and information. It is a fascinating idea for a game, and developer Luis Antonio put it all together very nicely, as even Hideo Kojima praises 12 Minutes. Things quickly spiral from there, and the "time loop" resets if the husband/player dies, or when the twelve minutes have expired. What starts out as a sweet romantic evening with his unnamed wife quickly turns into a nightmare, as a "cop" comes to the door and claims that his wife murdered her father eight years ago. The sixty-second pitch of 12 Minutes is that an unnamed man is trapped in an endless twelve-minute loop, and he must escape by figuring out an incredibly tense mystery.
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