Twelve Minutes review – a tense time-loop thriller

Xbox, PC; Luis Antonia/Annapurna Interactive
This stylish, twisted take on movies such as Rear Window and Chinatown marries noir sensibilities with puzzle gameplay

A man comes home to his small apartment, greets his wife and the two make affectionate small talk. But within the next five minutes, a cop will burst in, tie them both up, accuse the woman of murdering her father and finally strangle the man unconscious. At this point, time resets and the husband is mysteriously jolted back to the moment he arrived in the flat. He has 12 minutes to work out what his wife has done and why. And he'll live those same 12 minutes over and over again until it's solved.

This is the intriguing premise behind Annapurna Interactive's compact, tense point-and-click adventure, created by ex-Rockstar and Ubisoft developer Luis Antonio. Clearly inspired by the psychological thrillers of Hitchcock, Kubrick and Verhoeven, Twelve Minutes gives us a top-down chessboard view of a stage limited to just three rooms, with all the space provided by the backstories of the protagonists. Taking the role of the husband, the player must use each new playthrough to discover fresh information, exploring the apartment and working out how an array of seemingly unrelated objects - a mobile phone, a knife, a photo, a jar of sleeping pills - can be utilised or combined to open fresh conversational and deductive pathways.