Recenze Twelve Minutes » Vortex
Although I don’t despise basically any game genre and don’t get inferior when I play with Call of Duty friends of the same age at night, I welcome any title that deals with unusual topics, or topics that are common but still unusual. For this reason too, I was looking forward to Twelve Minutes by designer Luis Antonio, and it was not only the fact that the main trio of protagonists were dubbed by Hollywood actors that played a role. I was much more attracted to the game that its author had until then participated in the development of only one independent title, and only in the role of a graphic artist, which is usually a guarantee of something new, although it may not always work great. By the way, the game was The Witness, which shares with Twelve Minutes only a few logical puzzles and a certain amount of mystery, everything else is original for Antoni’s first project. For about five hours, you can immerse yourself in the very depressing story of a man who is trapped in a time loop for an unknown reason, and believe me, the way out will be neither easy nor too kind.
A story, nothing but a story
Since almost everything in Twelve Minutes has to do with the story of the protagonist, his wife and a supposed police officer who breaks into their apartment without invitation, it’s quite difficult to talk about a game without spoilers. Nevertheless, I will do my best not to reveal anything that could arouse at least a vague idea of where the story is actually going and what its resolution will be. However, it is certainly worth noting that the titular twelve minutes play more than a symbolic role in the plot, which, paradoxically, do not refer to how much time you actually have available for the vast majority of the game. Your time is limited to just ten minutes, which you will go through repeatedly and try to apply the newly acquired information in order to move on. Apart from the possibility of speeding up the dialogue that you have repeatedly gone through in previous cycles, the author does not offer any artistic form of moving the cycle to a decisive moment, as was the case in the films On the Groundhog Day or On the Edge of Tomorrow. Even after finishing and going through all possible ends, but I can’t tell exactly whether it was a good decision or a bad decision.
Twelve Minutes can frustrate you very quickly if you don’t know how to proceed. In reality, however, I came across a single real catch while playing, and in retrospect I had to blame only my own inattention, because the game gives enough indications in the conversations of the main protagonist with his wife. But I believe that players who do not speak English or are not in the mood for slower gameplay – despite the ten-minute time limit – may not recognize the slight nuances, and the spartan interface with the absence of help in the traditional style does not help. The game starts without you knowing what it’s all about and lets you explore a two-room apartment with a small bathroom and a wardrobe, in which, at least seemingly, there is nothing left to reveal during the second third pass. The escalating tension between the married couple, amplified, of course, by the incursion of the aforementioned police officer, but still offers more and more clues that can be followed and reveal new interactive places on the area of an otherwise quite small apartment.
Be careful
Each small step forward opens up branching dialogic possibilities from which everything essential can be gradually extracted, so that just before the final scenes you can estimate exactly what happened to your wife and her family and watch the confirmation with an open mouth. No, Twelve Minutes doesn’t have the most fantastic ending in the history of video games and doesn’t play with anything I wouldn’t have come across in stories, but the inability to find out exactly where the game is going until the last ten or twenty minutes was a very pleasant refreshment, and thanks to that I rank game in terms of script very high. This is significantly helped by the involvement of the actors mentioned in the introduction, which are James McAvoy in the role of the main character, Willem Dafoe as a mysterious man acting as a police officer and Daisy Ridley, who played the wife. All three make full use of their dramatic skills and add another dimension to already well-written dialogues. The most charismatic is especially Dafoe, who does not get as much space as the other two characters, but the color of his voice and intonation resonates perfectly with the seriousness and considerable displeasure of the whole story. Dafoe, resp. his character, he also has several diametrically different positions, is really a hit in the middle of an imaginary target and one of the best things that Luis Antonio was able to provide for his game.
In terms of gameplay, Twelve Minutes offers nothing revolutionary and despite the interesting perspective of the camera, it remains a traditional point-and-click adventure. In addition, there are not many interactive items, which can be an advantage on the one hand, because they are all useful for something, but it also makes it difficult to detect them and can lead to the described frustration in moments when you think you have exhausted all possibilities. But the game remains strictly logical, and if you follow the logic, you will reach the final titles. It is also nice that sometimes it pays to do nothing at all, or try to fail yourself in some place and thus find out if, thanks to the set trap, someone else could not succeed. The game will not penalize you in any way for repeating cycles that occur when the main character is harmed or tries to leave the apartment, so you have unlimited space and you can return to the beginning to the opening scenes with a suitable procedure.
This theater is played only by voice
Unfortunately, I find the biggest problem of the game in its technical processing, which can of course be partly excused by the fact that only about 40 people gradually worked on the game. On the other hand, it’s not quite small and Twelve Minutes, as a film-tuned game, fails in character animations and purely banal things such as collisions or shadows. Unfortunately, the overall experience is spoiled by the awkward walking of all three characters, non-follow-up actions, the mysterious disappearance of objects in an endless inventory with an imaginary pocket somewhere at the ass and the absence of any nice details in the environment. The minimalist approach to graphics thus indirectly forces you to just read the dialogues that appear on the screen and don’t really watch what the characters actually do. Unfortunately, there can be no question of any virtual acting, especially when famous actors collaborated on the development, and even if Twelve Minutes does not degrade to a textbook, you will not have a much deeper experience in this regard. It is also strange that Antonio was the most descriptive and detailed in the moments when you watch one of a handful of brutal scenes, but for example the romantic dance of a couple in love acts like a brakedance of two robots. The soundtrack also seemed surprisingly insignificant to me, which of course tries to underline the set atmosphere, but the player remains surrounded by only ambient sounds for a long time and the music only reaches him in full at the end.
In reality, however, I came across a single real catch while playing, and in retrospect I only had to blame my own inattention, because the game gives enough indications in the main protagonist’s conversations with his wife.
Nevertheless, as a whole Twelve Minutes works well and in the end you are driven mainly by things related to the story, which I do not want to reveal on the review area. And even though I probably originally expected something a little different, I definitely don’t regret the time spent with this game. Especially when you can play it without much risk through the Game Pass and come to an end in one go. There is no doubt that little will remain in you, and I am extremely curious as to what the next Antonio will come up with. If this is his first, then the second third game could overtake, for example, the titles from Qunatic Dream, at least in the area of the story and its possible branching.
