resurrection and repetition
Twelve Minutes, a recent point-and-click puzzle game from Annapurna Interactive, makes repetition its focus with a familiar cinematic trope. You control a man who keeps repeating the same period of time over and over again. The characters are voiced (rather needlessly) by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. The game’s design—Sims meets Rear Window (1954)—is remarkably simple, all viewed in high-angle, as if looking down on marionettes or action figures in a shoebox.
The man comes home; his wife tells him she’s pregnant; a man who claims to be a police officer breaks in—and things start to get weird. The cop hits you—you restart. You step outside the room—you restart. Whenever ten minutes pass—you restart. Your task is to manipulate the environment to trigger new events and learn more information. The problem is, the more you learn, the less you want to know: like many psychological thrillers, the revelations are rather repulsive.
Where Twelve Minutes ends up is so repulsive that some reviewers complained about a lack of proper content warnings, though it is rated M for Blood and Gore, Sexual Content, Strong Language, and Violence. (Besides, a detailed warning would certainly spoil the game.) Others simply found the game tedious, having to spend long periods of time replaying the same scene even once they’d figured out what they needed to do. The nastiness and tedium of the game, however, are central to what makes it worth playing.
In most games that have any kind of combat element, repetition ultimately leads to victory. After dying and respawning a dozen times, you finally defeat the boss or solve the puzzle or finish the quest. The game trains you in its patterns and, through hard-won mastery, you receive the satisfaction of completion. But in Twelve Minutes, repetition is less like honing skills than it is like reliving a nightmare of repression and disbelief.
In a 1914 paper, Sigmund Freud first outlined the concept of repetition compulsion, whereby people repress former events and continue to act them out without being aware of it:
For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority; instead he behaves in that way to the doctor. […] the patient repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the condition of resistance.
Twelve Minutes, for all its flaws, makes the idea of completing the game not one of satisfaction but of horror: to play it is to enact a kind of repetition compulsion. While the game does train you, it is not so that you can “beat” the game. It’s so that you can arrive at a truth from which there is no escape—aside from further repression, further self-delusion.
In gaming, a completionist is someone who favors exhausting the possibilities of a game—beating all the quests, collecting all the items, &c.—over getting straight to the end. I tend to prefer this; my favorite part about gaming has always been exploring a constructed world rather than barreling towards some (often unsatisfying) resolution.
In Twelve Minutes, there are several different endings, but none of them (really) offer a way out. Completion here is about knowing the truth without being able to scramble away from it. Despite its home-invasion shocks and horror-film taboos, perhaps the most upsetting part of Twelve Minutes is the way it implicates its players as doomed little completionists, trying again and again to figure out what happens even after we know that we won’t like what we find. We want to know; we want to see how it all ends. But what if it ends badly? Or worse: what if it never ends?
ben tapeworm