Twelve minutes it is, or at least should be, a game about trauma. It is, but it is not.
Yes, but isn’t it? What does this mean? Restart the story.
Twelve minutes is a game about a man trapped in a time loop. This time loop gives him the opportunity and the impetus to do terrible things to his wife. There are times when it made me feel bad.
How to get there, but there is not enough context for a real thesis. Please try again.
Twelve minutes released a week later Dungeon Bride, a hybrid of role-playing / simulation action queer action, which was fulfilled immediate controversy about what some stated that it was a warning of inappropriate content. Twelve minutes he asks you to drug your wife more than a dozen times as you twist your way through the torture of a man to give critical information. The same speech has not been repeated, despite the total lack of content warnings.
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Closer, but with words.
Twelve minutes is a game about hurting everyone around you as an excuse to process your own trauma. It is, in its most hopeful and generous reading, a game about a bad man trying to be better. I don’t think it deserves this reading. However, it deserves the quiet storm that stretches along its true end.
Good enough, for now.
The configuration of Twelve minutes it’s simple: a policeman comes to kill you and your wife, and you’ll be trapped for 12 minutes until you stop him. To break this loop, you will venture through a series of puzzles, discovering more and more information about the motivations and relationships of the characters. The animations of the game are rigid and their puzzles are obtuse. Voice sharing with stars is not given much to work on and does not contribute to the experience in any significant way. Its ending is terrible. That’s the most I can say without spoiling the whole game. Consider yourself wise.
Twelve minutes it has three major twists. First, that your wife killed her father. To find out, you have to watch her kill her from the closet. Secondly, that he didn’t kill his father and that it was actually you, the protagonist, who killed him. Oh, and you’re his brother. To learn that, you have to drug her and torture a man. And third, that all of this was part of your mental palace and the only thing that really happened was incest. That part was real. The rest has been a fantasy.
And what dirty fantasy is.
Twelve minutes it makes you see how your pregnant sister / wife (who was hard to type) gets kicked in the stomach, shot in the head and strangled. Drugging your sister / wife is critical to the plot and must be repeated several times. To get enough information from the cop, you’ll have to tie him to the ground and shoot his limbs until he speaks. Also, is there a really graphic animation to stab your wife into the game for … any reason? No one is entirely sure.
All this shit sucks, which adds to the little distribution it has. It’s like Twelve minutes it supported all the body weight on the nose and that nose breaks.
The cop who keeps killing you and your wife is actually the psychosexual representation of your own (shared) father. You know because they have the same voice actor, and at the actual end of the game, your dad uses the most repeated line of the cop to get you to stop fucking your sister: “Thanks for understanding why it has to be like this . ”It also reminds you that“ you can’t try again, ”consolidating the narrative of the game’s time loop as a failed attempt to imagine a world where you can happily continue your relationship with your sister / wife.
The daughter of the policeman, who dies of cancer, becomes a substitute for how his sister / wife sees it. Look, in the palace of the mind, the cop comes to kill your wife for revenge and steals your father’s pocket watch to sell it for his daughter’s cancer treatment. Killing yourself, your wife and stealing your pocket watch, thus becomes the metaphorical representation of ending your relationship. To save his daughter, he has to get her to give up the idea that you can both be together.
All of this Psych 101 writing could be fine if delivered with grace, tact, or care. But it is not. It feels pretentious and exhausting, like porn trauma by itself.
There is a more generous reading of this game. That your description of the palace of your fucked-up mind is a way of focusing on the fact that the power dynamic inherent in a secret incestuous relationship will always lead to your disappearance and the people who are hurt by it. That the only way to keep this lie is to be violent and abusive shit. That leaving someone you love will always be difficult, regardless of the context. And that good choices rooted in caring for other people are always possible, even for someone concerned with violent ideas. The game could win this reading if not tried so fucked up to be smart, from his psychosexual mental palace to his convoluted puzzle design that at some point asks you to show a baby shirt to the man you are torturing.
This attempt to present himself as intelligent, serious, and worthy of intellectual rigor has been leaked Twelve minutes every pore, including marketing launch. Of course, he opens with an orchestral tuning, which is how he is known to be smart. Of course, they got important actors for their voice acting, that’s how it’s known to be serious. Of course, terrible things happen over and over again, how much more would you know that he is worthy of intellectual rigor? I’ve heard people say the game is disturbing and I think they’re wrong. Twelve minutes he is not nervous, he is desperate.
It seems to have emerged from an earlier era. A place where the medium had not yet proved itself as art for a wider world, and instead tried to become a shadow of cinema. It is a Miniature David Cage game, to his voice cast with stars, and I wish he had the confidence or ability to be more.