12 Minutes – -apkrig

Dimmer – Interior – Apartment

A young man enters a darkened two-room apartment. He enjoys moments of solitude before the bathroom door opens and his wife enters the living room combined with the kitchen, hugs him and announces that she has made his favorite dessert. Looks like he wants to tell him some important news.

But a romantic evening disrupts the arrival of an uninvited guest who claims to be a police officer, has an arrest warrant and accuses your loved one of murdering her father. You can try to defend yourself, you can try to crawl handcuffed for a kitchen knife lying on the counter, but the result will be that the policeman (and is he really a policeman?) Gets angry and stuns the main character.

At that moment, the loop restarts, the young man finds himself in the doorway again and can’t believe what happened. His wife comes out of the bathroom again, he says the same thing. On a calm evening, lightning and thunder suddenly break through and a downpour begins. The husband tries to tell his wife that this has already happened, that he is experiencing the strangest déjà vu of his life, but she naturally does not trust him. And in a moment there is an old familiar knock on the door. We already know how the uninvited and unwelcome visit will turn out …

Minutes full of clicks

Twelve Minutes is a point-and-click adventure watched above, in which you are primarily fighting for time. Each passage is clearly delimited by the arrival of a police officer, but also by several other events that you must keep in mind in order to be able to take the chosen steps. Above all, you have relatively many options at first, you will probably spend the first passes through the loop researching the apartment, looking for active objects and trying to convince your wife that you have found yourself in a very non-standard situation.

It is quite difficult to write about such a minimalist game taking place on the surface of a small apartment (if you try to leave it, the loop will automatically restart) without grinding the spoilers. But I must say that my relationship with Twelve Minutes cooled significantly in the first minutes, right after I found out what control scheme the author Luís António chose. I played on the Xbox and point-and-click control via the analog stick is everything, just not comfortable, especially in situations where you need time.

The second thing that immediately takes the gaming experience one step down is the overall presentation and technical level. If I wanted to be cruel, I would say that I came up with freeware adventures, which I found in the Freeware section fifteen years ago on CDs attached to magazines. The animations of the characters are extremely rough, the models rely only on basic rough cues and the overall styling is completely without idea.

But it would be too harsh to blame a single person for not achieving any production value. A much bigger problem is the gameplay itself, or rather the implementation of a great idea into practice.

As I mentioned, the first few passes are fun, the game will give you a lot of ideas to try next time, open up new possibilities for dialogue and literally enjoy what the authors have hidden. At this stage, Twelve Minutes works perfectly, the dopamine rewards for coming up with something new, discovering another range of activities that could lead to a different result, are well dosed and, of course, you are driven by the desire to come to terms with the whole mystery.

Memories of the 90s

Trouble will come when this whole mechanism stalls and you get into a phase of helplessness. Witnesses to old freaks from Sierra or LucasArts may argue that sourdoughs are an integral part of classic adventures, but when you add a time loop to the equation, and therefore the need to repeat the same activities over and over again, often with uncertain results, frustration, boredom and very early desire find instructions somewhere.

The main problem is that the time loop is too long. If you fail to achieve the desired result in a particular pass, you waste time. I will give you one specific example. In order to have an interview with a police officer, you must gain physical advantage over him. It is not possible to attack “fairly”, so you have to come up with a more complicated plan. I came up with this:

Upon arrival at the apartment, I immediately picked up two cups so that my wife could not drink spontaneously. After the introductory interview, I poured water into a mug and threw sleeping pills, and I handed her the resulting cocktail. After a while, the woman takes off to collapse on the bed, so I can set a trap in the form of a piercing light switch and go hide in the closet.

A policeman arrives, finds a woman, tries to light himself, and is stunned by an electric shock. I immediately handcuff him with his own zipper and take a pistol, a knife and a phone from his pockets. After waking up, I have a short conversation with him, and when he seems to have calmed down, I agree to untie him and we will resolve it as people. But hey, as soon as he has his hands free, he gets angry that I took his things and immediately sends me to the ground with a punch.

Well, I say to myself and repeat the whole sequence in exactly the same way, with the difference that I leave everything in his pockets except the knife so that he can’t break free from the handcuffs. And what do you think? After X minutes of trying, the situation turns out THE SAME.

In the game, you have the opportunity to rewind already completed interviews, but you must always take partial steps and unfortunately in later stages they reach absolutely bizarre and tangled levels, reminiscent of old game legends, such as the goat puzzle from Broken Sword. And keep in mind that time is still ticking, so you don’t have much room for big thinking.

Famous voices without shine

The whole experience would be much more bearable if the script and acting performances corresponded to the demands that the author places on the player. But it’s not happening. First of all, the fact that the game boasted such names as James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe and Daisy Ridley years before its release, the result is absolutely sad. If I didn’t know what the actors were, I probably wouldn’t even know it (except for the noisy Dafoe), and forcing British actors (especially McAvoy) into American English is almost a crime against humanity.

Even worse is the recombined unraveling, which is without a doubt one of the biggest WTF games of my career, and please, I’m not as sensitive a boy as the Kotak authors, who criticize the game just for being able to apply sleeping pills to my wife. I don’t know if António tried to at least shock his audience as a reward for his obstacles, but the truth is that the result of the story sounds completely empty, mainly because you don’t have a chance to form any relationship with the characters during the game.

Beyond the secrets around which the whole game revolves, you will learn nothing about them at all (including such a basic thing as their names) and even moments that have great emotional potential (you can pierce your wife with a kitchen knife) simply mean nothing. , because there are two nameless dolls on the stage.

All in all, here is a classic example of a great idea that turns gray under the weight of poor execution. Twelve Minutes is lucky in just one thing: It debuts in the Game Pass, which is also the only reason why I would recommend that you give the game a chance, even on a few wheels. Given the fact that phenomenal second Psychonauts will be added to your subscription tomorrow, you probably won’t have time for that.