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You and your wife are enjoying dessert when there’s a knock at the door. It’s the police. An officer enters, zip-ties your wife’s hands, and interrogates her. When you try to stop him, violence ensues, a cello string gets plucked, and your day resets.
This is Twelve Minutes, the hit indie video game released last summer that’s like Groundhog Day reimagined as a psychological thriller. As players loop through the story line (which resets whenever they leave the apartment or die—or when 12 minutes have passed), they must slowly piece together what is happening.
The game was written, coded, and designed by Luis Antonio, who worked as an artist at Rockstar Games and Ubisoft before leaving the corporate world to help legendary indie game designer Jonathan Blow create his critically acclaimed The Witness in 2016. While working with Blow, Antonio began developing the concept for a looping-style game, in which the characters that players meet aren’t static, but imbued with emotional secrets and needs.
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