Twelve Minutes is a top-down, point-and-click adventure game that takes place in real time. You are doomed to live the same twelve minutes over and over inside your apartment.

The only way out is to use your knowledge of what is going to happen to change the outcome and break the loop.

Concerning the top-down perspective, developer Luis Antonio has said:

For this project, one of my goals is for someone that never plays videogames to be able to sit down and immediately understand and connect with the game without sacrificing the experience.

This is one of the main reasons for a top down view. By removing the third dimension its easier to navigate and have a good spacial awareness of what is going on. What it removes in terms of immersion it brings back in terms of clarity.

The other part was to have an accessible user interface. I’ve always been a big fan of the old ‘point-and-click’, and how you can do so many different interactions by combining objects with verbs, but I also remember how I would end up frustrated trying to “guess what the designer wants you to do here.”

That is a very hard problem to solve, and something I hope I can alleviate somehow, but I believe the old ‘verb’ overcomplicated interface only adds to the problem.

In Twelve Minutes you combine different items by dragging them. As long as each object can convey its purpose (e.g. Key + Door) there is a lot less trial and error and most solutions end up being found by logical deduction (or so I hope).

I was happily surprised to find that this system allows for a huge range of interactions and is still very intuitive.

Twelve Minutes is still at the prototype stage. I’ve been unable to discover the platforms for which it’s being developed.