For a while, Heavy Rain was considered the peak of video game storytelling. You might be sitting there thinking “Nah, Heavy Rain was naff,” and I’m right there with you. A man wandering around at night creating origami for no reason other than to trick the audience? Genius. But here’s the thing - the game fooled you. You didn’t guess the ending, and that’s what made it great. Twelve Minutes is inspired by the same style of storytelling.
I'm not arguing Heavy Rain was gaming's answer to John Steinbeck. It wasn't even gaming's answer to Stephen King. 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 has all the ingredients. But not only does it fail to put them all together - it never seems particularly interested in trying. 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.
Gaming still doesn't have an answer to Steinbeck. It desperately wants to be as respected as film, but it still isn't mature enough to have a Promising Young Woman moment. Gaming probably has caught up with King, however. While it still lacks the consistency of a great paperback, on its A-game it can deliver top notch stories that pull you into the character's world and grab you tightly. Sony has arguably gone too far in this direction, with the emotional beats its games revolve around becoming formulaic, but the likes of The Last of Us, God of War, Red Dead Redemption, Life is Strange, and various Telltale titles highlight how games can tell their stories much more competently than a decade ago. Fittingly for a game about time loops, Twelve Minutes turns back the clock on these advancements.
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Major spoilers for Twelve Minutes below.
Twelve Minutes has all the makings of a great game. A time loop narrative, told via point and click mechanics in a shoebox apartment, published by Annapurna? Sign me the heck up. 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. Of course 'star-fucking', as it's known in the industry, does not always yield results. Annapurna's biggest misstep prior to Twelve Minutes was Maquette, which starred Bryce Dallas Howard. 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. Dafoe is threatening, desperate, soft, and contrite, while Ridley sells the confusion about the time loop and McAvoy the frustration. Big stars will attract more attention, but they play their parts well. The problem is the ridiculous story.
Twelve Minutes opens with a 'cop' - it never really explains if he's posing as a cop or has gone rogue - breaking into your house and killing you and your wife. Through the time loop, you manage to discover why he's there and how to stop him. Turns out your wife murdered her father on Christmas Eve and has been on the run since. The cop later reveals he was actually killed on New Year's Eve, meaning it was not your wife - it was, in fact, you. However, for some reason, you don't quite figure it out yet, and your character certainly doesn't tell the audience.
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The twist is that you and your wife are related - you're half-siblings - and you only discover this when you tell the cop the name of your unborn baby, which is the same name as your mother’s. At first, I thought the reaction to discovering your sister/wife's nanny was called Dahlia was odd - it's not like there's only one Dahlia in the world, right? My partner and I have mothers with the same name, although having met them both, I can confirm they are different people, so we aren't incestuous sinners. We're just lesbian sinners.
Getting back to Twelve Minutes though, the problem with the Dahlia reveal is that it should never have been the moment of confirmation. It's the most show stopping part - it's very Heavy Rain - but it doesn't quite make sense in the way it should. Your character knows, from the very start, that you killed your father. No one else knows - that's the real mystery the game wants you to solve - but you do. You don't know it was also your wife's father, but when she confesses to killing her father on Christmas Eve, you don't think to share your own burden? You don't have an inkling to reveal your greatest secret to your wife, just as she reveals hers, when they're so clearly a shared pain? Even without knowing they're the same person - I grant that 'oh we must be incest lovers' is not the first logical leap - you both killed your father. You love this woman, so much so that one ending lets you continue in incestuous bliss. Yet you never think to tell her?
That's because everything is in service of the twist. 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. 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?
The incest barely comes into it. 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. The pair had no idea they were related and the game ends shortly after you make your decision. 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. Gaming had moved on from this era of narrative - it shouldn’t have to time loop back again.