![]() ![]() Then I tried the mug on the end table, which I had previously filled with water for her, but that just led to a come-on about being thirsty. No dice - she had apparently mentioned her evening plans earlier that day. Certain items, like keys, will go into your inventory, and you can drag them onto objects in the world where interactions involving them make sense.įirst, I clicked on a spoon lying on the dinner table, since my character’s wife had told me during the first loop that she had prepared dessert for us. Anything you can interact with will be highlighted with a pop-up of its name that appears when you mouse over it. Then I had the more difficult task of actually convincing her that something weird was going on.Īt that point, I had to figure out which objects in the apartment would be likely to trigger a line that would prove I was reliving this day. After my very first loop, a new option appeared in conversations with my character’s wife: “Tell her this feels like the same day.” Whereas Outer Wilds’ spaceship features a computer that logs each new discovery, Twelve Minutes’ dialogue changes to reflect new loops and events. Twelve Minutes is analogous to Mobius Digital Games’ time loop game Outer Wilds in that the player and the game’s protagonist can increase their knowledge with every loop. Image: Luis Antonio/Annapurna Interactive The lack of any in-game clocks, according to Antonio, forces you to “hold more in your head, rather than relying on the game.” “It’s about the repetition of time, but the time is not what’s important here,” said Antonio. All you know is that the game takes place at dusk. While there is still a clock in the pause menu, it shows only the minute hand, not the hour. And there are no longer any clocks within the environment, because Antonio found that players gain an instinctive sense of how much time has passed once they’ve completed a few loops. ![]() ![]() The décor of the apartment is meant to be timeless, or at least, the place is designed in a way to prevent it from feeling like a period piece. The three characters don’t have names anymore, partly because Antonio wants you to “impart your own values” on them. ![]() Other aspects of Twelve Minutes have evolved. The premise is also the same as it was in 2015: The player character comes home to his wife, who has planned a special evening for the two of them, which gets interrupted when an intruder assaults them. The central conceit of the game remains unchanged it consists of up-to-12-minute loops inside a one-bedroom apartment. Antonio has spent the intervening years refining the game, eliminating elements that he realized were superfluous. “Since that prototype, it was a lot about removing things,” Antonio told me in a Discord call last month, after I had played two loops of Twelve Minutes (which, admittedly, is far from the optimal amount of time to spend trying out the game). But in some ways, the final product - due out this year on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, though there’s no concrete release date yet - will actually be simpler than the initial prototype. What started as a side project while Antonio was working on The Witness has since grown into a prestige indie game with a Hollywood voice cast and the imprimatur of boutique publisher Annapurna Interactive ( What Remains of Edith Finch, Gorogoa, Outer Wilds). I first played it more than six years ago, at PAX East 2015, the first time developer Luis Antonio showed the game publicly. Twelve Minutes, the point-and-click adventure game that takes place in a time loop of the titular length, has been in development for the better part of the past decade - and it has been making appearances on “ most anticipated games of the year” lists for almost as long. ![]()
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