Twelve Minutes | Xbox Review

Oh boy. Where to begin? Twelve Minutes is a colossal, unyielding disappointment. Its time loop premise and single apartment hook had me damn near frothing at the mouth for this title. I know I’m not alone, either, as seemingly the entire industry was over the moon excited for this one. Maybe it should be a lesson to all of us about keeping our expectations in check.

A Strong Start

Right away, the game grabs you tight with its incredible hook. For those first few loops, you’re on pins and needles as the possibilities flow through your mind. You play as The Man, who lives in a tiny apartment with The Wife. They’re celebrating some very exciting news before The Cop intrudes into their lives and ends up killing them both. Snap to twelve minutes ago, and The Man has to live through it all again.

What a premise, right? I can hardly think of a more compelling setup for an interactive story. Dear lord was I wrong. The crushing weight of disappointment crept in slowly over time, but thinking back about how badly Twelve Minutes executes its potential almost makes me mad.

Over and Over Again

Trial-and-error gameplay seems unavoidable given the premise, but it could not have been implemented any worse. It’s hard to properly illustrate how beyond frustrating it is to want to try one small thing differently in a loop, but have to kill time for eight minutes to do so. The frustration is palpable when a plan doesn’t work, but it’s made all the worse by how long you have to wait around or go through the same interactions to try again. There’s a couple tricks to speed things up slightly, but it’s not enough. While the repetition of tasks is inevitable and inherent to Twelve Minute’s setup, it’s handled absolutely obnoxiously. And I came in wanting the repetition inherent to this trope!

One small example so I don’t risk spoiling too much: There’s a photograph on the fridge you can use in a variety of ways, but to grab it you must have The Man slowly open the fridge door and then look up and grab it. It sounds small, but these minor annoyances are widespread and drilled into your brain. Why not just have the character grab it right away? There’s no other reason to open the fridge after you discover the photo, and it’s already really dumb it’s hidden away behind another item’s interaction interface anyway.

In fact, a lot of solutions are tucked away in stupid ways. There’s a cell phone forgotten within a pile of coats, as if any person in this day and age would misplace their phone in such a way when preparing a surprise for their partner. I usually let these kinds of things go for the sake of a story, but when a game about deducing a logical series of events abandons common sense, it’s unfair and tiresome.

What a Twist

Look, I won’t dance around the fact that a lot of people online are going to be discussing the game’s big twist. Twelve Minutes introduces a fairly taboo topic into its central story later on, and it’s going to be hard for a lot of people to digest. I get that to some extent, but for me the bigger crime is how this twist is implemented. In that, it isn’t at all. The game makes no theme or judgement out of said twist, the characters don’t learn anything valuable about themselves; it’s purely there for shock value.

Twelve Minutes also abandons all of the rules regarding its time loop near the end. It just keeps making stuff up as the plot demands it. Why should I invest myself in this narrative when it’s clearly not invested in itself? The all-star cast of James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley (both utilizing questionable American accents), and Willem Dafoe are all wasted on this script. The storyline is so absurd, poorly thought out, and riddled with holes that a soap opera writing staff would laugh it out of the room. I love, love, love time loop stories, but this might be the worst one I’ve experienced.

Escape This Loop of Madness

Readers here know how much being negative pains us at The Gaming Outsider. We really do believe in our credo that there’s no such thing as a bad game, just games that aren’t for you. Well, dear reader, I hope this lands better for you than it did for me. Twelve Minutes is one of the dumbest stories I’ve played through in a game, and it’s frustratingly obtuse to even get there. Twelve Minutes is a game obsessed with time, so it’s a shame that it’s a complete waste of it.

This review is based on a Game Pass copy of Twelve Minutes for Xbox. It is also available on PC via Steam.