Zelda, Ephemeral Fantasia and Returnal have all been there. Twelve Minutes is not the first game to explore the concept of the time loop. There are also a few plot holes that never really get fully explained, although that ensures you have plenty to think about and argue with – even after the main six to eight-hour thriller is apparently over. However, while it manages to tick all the boxes, theres something missing in the execution.

Along the way, the rather clipped, functional dialogue doesn’t really give the stellar voice cast of James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe much room to show off their immense talent. Twelve Minutes, the latest Annapurna Interactive game, seems like a new classic on paper. There are certainly frustrating moments trying to coax characters into particular conversations or specific positions in order to enact your plans can take longer than necessary, even though you’re able to fast-forward through familiar conversations. 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. 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. This is the intriguing premise behind Annapurna Interactive’s compact, tense point-and-click adventure, created by ex-Rockstar and Ubisoft developer Luis Antonio. And he’ll live those same 12 minutes over and over again until it’s solved. Once Twelve Minutes reveals the husband and wife are half-siblings, the game has one more trick up its sleeve.The third twist of Twelve Minutes is that the apartment where the entire game takes place is actually a mental construct inside the husbands imagination. He has 12 minutes to work out what his wife has done and why. At this point, time resets and the husband is mysteriously jolted back to the moment he arrived in the flat. 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. A man comes home to his small apartment, greets his wife and the two make affectionate small talk.

12 minutes game ending explained