![]() ![]() Annapurna's biggest misstep prior to Twelve Minutes was Maquette, which starred Bryce Dallas Howard. Of course 'star-fucking', as it's known in the industry, does not always yield results. ![]() 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. A time loop narrative, told via point and click mechanics in a shoebox apartment, published by Annapurna? Sign me the heck up. Twelve Minutes has all the makings of a great game. 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. But not only does it fail to put them all together - it never seems particularly interested in trying. 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 wasn't even gaming's answer to Stephen King. I'm not arguing Heavy Rain was gaming's answer to John Steinbeck. Twelve Minutes is inspired by the same style of storytelling. You didn’t guess the ending, and that’s what made it great. But here’s the thing - the game fooled you. A man wandering around at night creating origami for no reason other than to trick the audience? Genius. You might be sitting there thinking “Nah, Heavy Rain was naff,” and I’m right there with you. This prompts a quote the wife cites earlier, which alludes to finding zen through mindfulness (aka living in the present moment).For a while, Heavy Rain was considered the peak of video game storytelling. ![]() The only true ending without a return to the apartment is the ending where players click on the book their wife was reading that's on the bookcase in the discussion scene. The pocket watch is still there though, which means he can return to the conversation with the father. If the husband agrees to leave his wife now and never tell her the truth, he ends up alone in the same apartment. ![]() That's because this scene isn't a flashback, it's the present. In the two endings that cause the credits to roll, the husband once again has a flashback to a discussion with the father, but this time the father is bald and the setting is different. In 12 Minutes, Dafoe's cop and the father are in fact one and the same. Like in the plot twist for Metal Gear Solid V,voice actors are always an important clue. However, to make sense of the different endings a key piece of information is required, which is the answer to who exactly is Dafoe voicing? If the player chooses to stay with the wife or tell her the truth, then the time loop continues to repeat. The details between endings may seem minute, with the big choices being to stay with your wife and not tell her, to reveal the truth, or to agree to leave and never see her again. There are essentially five different endings to 12 Minutes, all resulting in an achievement unlocking but not all causing the credits to roll. It's tempting to write this off as the game just wanting to get the most bang for their buck with a big-name actor like Dafoe, but the implications of this fact are far more complex. What causes the most confusion here is that the father is voiced by Willem Dafoe, as is the cop. A flashback will occur, involving a confrontation between the father and the protagonist in which the father reveals he is father to both the husband and the wife and instructs the husband to leave now and avoid any further pain for anyone involved. Things get complicated from here on out due to the multiple paths the player can take. It is a dark twist, but it also poses a big question: how did the husband forget that his wife is his sister? Especially considering the clue that leads to this is the discovery that the nanny's name is Dahlia, as is the husband's mother's. This means that the protagonists have been unknowingly been committing incest and will soon produce a child of that incest. It turns out 12 Minutes' protagonist is the killer all along, but that truth is largely overshadowed by the fact that it's been established the wife's half-brother, the product of an affair between her father and her nanny, is the killer. ![]()
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