Opinion time: Nothing gets me suspicious about a game’s quality like celebrity casting.
C’mon people, there’s already professionals who get paid to voice video game characters and are often quite good at it. They’re called voice actors.
Let’s be real, celebrity actors don’t get hired because of their talent. Sadly, Johnny Yong Bosch voicing a character isn’t going to draw in a ton of people.
And now we’re in a dystopian reality where I expect to hear a news about Chris Pratt voicing a Bloodborne character.
With that mildly related rant out of the way, we have Twelve Minutes. A time-travel adventure game (?) which features voice acting from Willem Dafoe, Daisy Ridley, and James McAvoy.
I’d be fucking amazed if anyone recognized McAvoy and Ridley by their voices alone.
What’s it About?
The premise is simple: you’re having dinner with your wife and then Willem Dafoe barges in before murdering the both of you.
No doubt something many of us have nightmares about.
After you die, you get sent back in time, right at the start of the dinner. From there, you have to mess around with trial and error and try to find a way to defeat Willem Dafoe before he kills you and your wife.
In the meantime, there’s an intrigue regarding a watch that Dafoe really wants and hints of something mysterious in your wife’s past.
The Good
First things first, the premise is pretty great. You can try all sorts of stupid shit, get into some hilarious situations, see what works, learning from your mistakes, all the good stuff.
There’s a lot great bits to go through here, and it felt appropriately gratifying to make progress.
It’s helped by the presentation too. It’s nothing too exciting but things are generally clean and clear.
The top down perspective feels fitting for the tone of the game. It feels impersonal and detached, which is perfect for a game where you let the main character die horribly to find the correct solution.
Since the whole thing is basically a puzzle, it does have the satisfying feeling once you figure out the solution.
I’ve recommended the game to a few people and all of them have enjoyed the process of stumbling from failure to failure to figure out the solution. I guess that says a lot about how good the core idea of the game is.
The Bad
Well, it can’t all be sunshine and rainbows, and it’s obvious from the title that I’ve got a bone to pick with this game.
Most of it has to do with its plot twist, but we’ll get to that later. First, I want to discuss some of my general gripes with the game.
First, is the lack of interactivity.
Let me establish it right away, I’m not one of those wierdos who can’t enjoy the game unless the horse’s testicles shrink realistically.
However, the lack of interactivity in Twelve Minutes takes away from the core experience in a pretty significant way.
There’s just so few things inside the apartment to interact with. Combined with the fact that the game takes place in just 3 rooms, it just feels a bit empty once you get your bearings.
Sure, I can steal my wife’s phone and flush it down the toilet but that adds nothing to the main goal of stopping Willem Dafoe.
Or for that matter, I can’t even ask her to hide in the goddamn closet.
I don’t want to place a banana peel in front of the door like a Looney Tunes character, but something more would have helped.
The second problem is something that time loop games have to often deal with. Once you fail, you have to start all the way from scratch.
It’s not like, say, Binding of Isaac where you press restart and you’re instantly back in the game. Restarting means sitting through the same dialogue options, repeating the same puzzle, trying to see if something new has unlocked.
For example, at one point, you have to hand over an item in the middle of a conversation. Simple, right?
Well, you have to hand it over at one specific point of the conversation. If you’re slightly early or slightly late, then good fucking luck because you’re starting all over again.
From now on, I’m going into heavy spoiler territory so be warned.
The Ugly Twist
Sigh…
Okay, no beating around the bush.
The big twist of the game is that the main character is an incestuous murderer.
There are twists that make you go “wow that blew my mind” and there are twists that make you go “that makes no fucking sense, what the fuck”. And then there’s this.
It’s not that the twist doesn’t make sense or isn’t foreshadowed. The problem is why they’d even do something like this in the first place. Seriously?
Let me be upfront, it’s not that the topic is taboo. I fucking love Silent Hill 2 and 3, and they certainly didn’t go easy on hard topics.
My issue is that the twist attempts to re-contextualize the main character, despite the fact that he as a person was a non-entity throughout the game.
His wife has a personality, as basic as it is, and so does Willem Dafoe. Meanwhile, the main character is a void that walks around doing whatever we ask him to do. Sure, he wants to not die and save is wife but that’s basically nothing to go on.
In fact, let me go back to Silent Hill 2 for a bit. Spoiler warning for the game.
If you haven’t played Silent Hill 2 yet, I’ll recommend you just close this tab and go play it. It’s one of the greatest games of all time and getting into it unspoiled can be an amazing experience.
So, Silent Hill 2 has you play as James Sunderland, gormless wife finder extraordinaire. He’s in the town of Silent Hill to find his wife, because he got a letter from his wife, except she happens to be dead.
But as we go through the game, we discover that James was the one who killed his wife (ruh roh, raggy!)
What makes it work in Silent Hill 2, and not in 12 Minutes, is that Silent Hill 2 is about James. The town, the monsters, the story, they’re trying plucked right out of James’ mind. When you play the game, you get to know James very intimately.
So when the twist hits, it’s actually impactful. It changes how we see James and his whole quest.
Meanwhile, the twist in 12 Minutes is completely disconnected from the game so far. The twist doesn’t change how we view the character, because he has none till that point.
After the twist, we’re shown the main character as someone struggling between his own selfishness, love for his wife, and disgust at how things were.
But again, where was this shown in the game before this?
In Conclusion
So where does that leave us with 12 Minutes?
A game that had a lot of potential, some annoying flaws, and a twist that added nothing and took away a lot from the experience.
If I wasn’t feeling charitable, I’d liken it to an artsy student film that throws in taboo topics, repetitive scenes, ambiguity, with the hopes that others will take a meaning from this mess without attempting to say anything by itself.
