This article contains major plot spoilers for 12 Minutes.
2021 seems like a pretty good year for time loops in video games. Returnal showed players how a time loop can narratively impact roguelikes, and the upcoming Deathloop is showing how it can be used in an immersive FPS. 12 Minutes is taking the premise and showcasing exactly how a time loop can be used in a narrative-focused point-and-click adventure game to great effect.
There are some pretty major twists and turns in the latest Annapurna Interactive published title. Each loop in 12 Minutes sees the player character discovering more about the mystery surrounding the loop itself and the murder of his wife’s father. By the time the credits roll, the title has covered a lot of ground, narratively speaking, but the biggest twist of the entire game revolves around the player character’s identity and how that impacts the other figures in the story.
12 Minutes: Who Are You?
When 12 Minutes first starts, the player character seems to be a pretty ordinary person who’s caught in an unexplained head-scratching time loop that he cannot seem to escape from. For the first five minutes or so, things for the character seem to be going pretty well, he lives with his loving wife and, over dessert, finds out that he’s going to be a father. Not long after, a violent cop enters his apartment saying that he’s there for a rare and expensive pocket watch that’s being kept hidden by the wife. This is when the real mystery of 12 Minutes gets going.
The pocket watch in 12 Minutes was the wife’s father’s back when he was still alive, but, as revealed by the cop in subsequent loops, the wife supposedly murdered her father due to his abusive behavior. Eventually, the player is able to prove the wife’s innocence after discovering that her father wasn’t killed in the initial shooting, but several days after in another shooting. The realization of who actually killed the father begins dawning on the player after discovering that the father had an affair with a woman named Dahlia, who happens to be the player character’s mother.
It’s revealed that Dahlia’s son, 12 Minutes’ protagonist, was the one who killed the wife’s father. What’s more, as the wife’s father is also the player character’s father, the couple realizes that they’re half-siblings in a horrid twist of fates. The player character, voiced by James McAvoy, reveals that he’s repressed the memory of murdering his own father which is why he had never brought it up to his wife. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the wife is pregnant with the player’s child, bringing some major ethical questions into play.
The wife reveals that her mother always called the father’s bastard son “monster,” which were her father’s dying words spoken to the cop who enters the apartment every loop. The cop and the father were very close, which is why he feels entitled to the pocket watch that remains hidden by the wife, but upon realizing that the “monster” the father was referring to in his final moments was the player, he decides to take different actions.
After the dust settles of the main events of 12 Minutes, it’s clear that the player character had much more relation to the central conflict than he was initially letting on. When the twist hits revealing that he’s related by blood to his pregnant wife, he transforms from an every-man relatable protagonist to someone more heinous and definitely much less relatable.
12 Minutes is available now on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Game Pass.