![]() ![]() It is a David Cage game in miniature, all the way down to its star-studded voice cast, and I wish it had the confidence or capacity to be more. One where the medium had yet to prove itself as art to a wider world, and so instead tried to spin itself into being a shadow of film. It seems to have emerged from a previous era. Twelve Minutes isn’t edgy, it is desperate. Of course terrible things happen over and over and over again, how else would you know it is worthy of intellectual rigour? I have heard people call the game’s twist edgy, and I think they’re wrong. Of course they secured major actors for its voice cast, that’s how you know it’s serious. ![]() Of course it opens with an orchestra tuning, that’s how you know it’s smart. This attempt to present itself as smart, and serious, and worthy of intellectual rigour, has seeped into Twelve Minutes’ every pore, including its marketing rollout. The game could earn this reading if it weren’t trying so fucking hard to be smart, from its psychosexual mind palace to its convoluted puzzle design that at one point asks you to show a baby shirt to the man you’re torturing. ![]() And that good choices rooted in a care for other people are always possible, even for someone preoccupied with violent ideations. That leaving someone you love will always be hard, regardless of the context. That the only way to maintain this lie is to be an abusive, violent shitheel. That its depiction of your fucked-up mind palace is a way of centering the fact that the power dynamics inherent in a secret incestuous relationship will always lead to its demise, and to the people therein getting hurt. There is a more generous reading to this game. It feels pretentious and exhausting, like trauma porn for the sake of itself. To save his daughter, he has to get you to give up on the idea that you two can be together.Īll of this Psych 101 writing could be fine if it were delivered with grace, or tact, or care. Killing you, your wife, and stealing the pocket watch, thus becomes the metaphorical representation of ending your relationship. See, in the mind palace, the cop is coming to kill your wife for revenge and to steal your father’s pocket watch in order to sell it for his daughter’s cancer treatment. The cop’s daughter, who is dying from cancer, then becomes a stand-in for how he sees your sister/wife. You can tell because they have the same voice actor, and in the game’s true ending, your father uses the cop’s most oft-repeated line to get you to stop fucking your sister: “Thank you for understanding why it needs to be this way.” He also reminds you that “you can’t just try again,” cementing the game’s time loop narrative as a failed attempt to envision a world where you happily get to continue your relationship with your sister/wife. The cop who keeps killing you and your wife is actually the psychosexual representation of your own (shared) father. It’s as if Twelve Minutes was supporting its entire body weight on its nose, and that nose is breaking. Also, there’s a really graphic animation for stabbing your wife to death in the game for…some reason? No one’s quite sure.Īll of this shit sucks, which is compounded by how poorly delivered it is. ![]() To get enough information from the cop, you must zip tie him on the ground and shoot his limbs until he talks. Drugging your sister/wife is plot critical, and must be repeated multiple times. Twelve Minutes makes you watch as your pregnant sister/wife (this was tough to type) is kicked in the stomach, shot in the head, and strangled. And third, that all of this was part of your psychosexual mind palace and the only thing that really happened was the incest. To learn this, you have to drug her and torture a man. Second, that she failed to kill her father and it was actually you, the protagonist, who killed him. To learn this, you have to watch her get murdered from the closet. ![]()
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