The hallway between the elevator and the apartment door-eerily carpeted with the autumnal pattern from The Shining's Overlook Hotel-serves as a brief tutorial: learn to navigate from the game's top-down perspective, find a fake rock in the potted plant outside the apartment, use the fake rock to find the key within, take that key and use it on the door. I say "almost entirely" because, as the game begins, its unnamed protagonist (voiced by James McAvoy) rides the elevator up to that apartment. But that smallness contains narrative and mechanical multitudes that pay off consistently over the course of 12 Minutes' six-hour runtime. It is spare in length and small in scope, taking place almost entirely within a one-bedroom apartment. Gaming had moved on from this era of narrative - it shouldn’t have to time loop back again.12 Minutes is the time-loop story reduced to its very essence. There's definitely a better way to tell this story, but the main problem is this is so clearly a game where the twist came first and everything else came second. The pair had no idea they were related and the game ends shortly after you make your decision. Clearly, the game is written for shock value, and the whole 'getting your sister pregnant' thing is supposed to be upsetting, but that's not what bothered me. You, a bastard child, unloved by your father, who killed him on New Year's Eve, don't ever start to connect the dots? No, but when the 'cop' reveals the nanny had a name like a flower, suddenly there's no other possibilities out there? Likewise, you later find out that your wife's father was actually killed on New Year's Eve by the bastard child he never loved. That's because everything is in service of the twist. Big stars will attract more attention, but they play their parts well. Dafoe is threatening, desperate, soft, and contrite, while Ridley sells the confusion about the time loop and McAvoy the frustration. Still, while it's strange that McAvoy and Ridley were seemingly hired just to get them to put on weird American accents that Ridley especially struggles to hold, the cast is the best thing about the game. Annapurna's biggest misstep prior to Twelve Minutes was Maquette, which starred Bryce Dallas Howard. Of course 'star-fucking', as it's known in the industry, does not always yield results. What's that? Avid gamer James McAvoy, the brilliant Willem Dafoe, and the usually-quite-alright Daisy Ridley feature too? Shaping up to be this year's cult hit. A time loop narrative, told via point and click mechanics in a shoebox apartment, published by Annapurna? Sign me the heck up. Twelve Minutes has all the makings of a great game. Any potentially compelling parts of the narrative are thrown out the window in service of a 'gotcha' ending, because in that era of gaming, the twist was about as close to ‘real’ storytelling as you were likely to get. But not only does it fail to put them all together - it never seems particularly interested in trying. Heavy Rain has a decent story at its core - it involves a doomed marriage in the wake of a child's death, another child’s kidnapping, a private detective and hot shot cop both on the trail, a rich businessman on the hook, drugs, love, deceit, and betrayal. It wasn't even gaming's answer to Stephen King. I'm not arguing Heavy Rain was gaming's answer to John Steinbeck. Twelve Minutes is inspired by the same style of storytelling. You didn’t guess the ending, and that’s what made it great. But here’s the thing - the game fooled you. A man wandering around at night creating origami for no reason other than to trick the audience? Genius. You might be sitting there thinking “Nah, Heavy Rain was naff,” and I’m right there with you. For a while, Heavy Rain was considered the peak of video game storytelling.
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