The evening begins rather well for our everyday hero, who returns home and finds his wife for a romantic dinner. But after a few minutes, a policeman arrives in the apartment, handcuffs the wife and accuses her of parricide, her father having died eight years ago. And now...it's up to you! Will you try to fight? If this is the case, know that the cop (or thug?) will systematically have the upper hand and will kill you or send you to the apples. Either way, you'll wake up on your doorstep and be amazed to find that this half-romantic, half-dramatic evening has just begun again. And it will always be the same as soon as twelve minutes have passed since you entered the apartment. Welcome to the loop! If you remember past events (or rather future, suddenly), your wife is however not aware of them. It's up to you to try to convince her of what's going to happen, or to set up a plan to make things happen differently.
Regarding the gameplay itself, Twelve Minutes is a real adventure game, which incorporates the main principles of point and click. So you have a system of multiple choice dialogues, interactive areas and some transportable objects. But the concept of time loop brings a new breath to the puzzles. It is necessary to think "out of the box" and we feel a real relief when after several unsuccessful attempts, one of our ideas finally turns out to be functional. Besides, the lifespan depends greatly on your sagacity. We reached the game's first real ending (there are six in all, one or two of which are almost the blink of an eye) in just three hours, while some of our colleagues (whom we won't name, out of charity Christian) needed eight hours to reach this stage, and were stuck for a long time at certain crucial stages.
AGAINST THE WATCH
Beyond its purely playful qualities, Twelve Minutes is also worth its atmosphere and its staging. The bias of a top view camera works all the better as the game takes place almost entirely in a modest apartment consisting of a main room, a bedroom, a bathroom and a living room. tiny closet. There emerges from the whole an atmosphere of closed doors which adds to the dramatic force of the story. Moreover, the latter does not hesitate to play the script twist card impossible to see coming. And what a twist! We won't say a word about its exact nature, but know that it has confused many players. For us, this is one of the greatest successes of the adventure, but it is fully subjective.
Very cinematographic at heart, Twelve Minutes also provides voice casting, as it calls on James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe. Suffice to say that the VOSTFR is a delight. Unique decor and top view oblige, we are dealing with something quite simple graphically. This simplicity is fortunately not lacking in aesthetics, the perspective and the pretty light effects proving to be very attractive. On the other hand, the character animation is far too rigid for a modern game. Which is also very surprising since the developers have used the sacrosanct motion capture. The dialogue system also sins, because some lines link up rather poorly with each other or do not fully take into account the various past loops. Nothing catastrophic, but these small inconveniences still reduce the general pleasure of play.
