Earlier this week, a new trailer for the upcoming game Twelve Minutes revealed that its cast would be led by Daisy Ridley (The Star Wars sequel trilogy, Murder on the Orient Express, Ophelia), James McAvoy (Split, Atonement, X-Men: First Class), and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man, The Lighthouse, The Florida Project). Now, we have a behind the scenes look at their voice sessions, with commentary on the story of the anticipated interactive thriller.
“Twelve Minutes is about the danger of truly examining within, and really looking deep and trying to unpick your actions, you know?” says McAvoy, who is voicing the lead protagonist. “This game is something you play, but it’s also something you create.”
In Twelve Minutes, you play as a man who is having a romantic evening at home with his wife when an intruder, said to be a police detective, breaks into your apartment. He accuses your wife of murder and beats you to death. Except you don’t die, for you find yourself taken back to the moment when you first opened the door. You’re stuck in a twelve-minute time loop, reliving the same traumatic and horrible experience until you find a way to break out.
“It will be different things for different people,” says Ridley, who plays the man’s wife. “There are so many versions of the story that will either reveal something or show something and you, as the player, are revealing how you deal with truth, how you deal with other people’s truth.”
Since the game is a top-down thriller with a click and drag interface, you can’t clearly see the expressions on the characters’ faces. On this, Ridley says, “Particularly because you don’t see our faces in it, you really are projecting whatever you’re feeling onto the character. There’s no facial expressions that are instructing you. Where you go in the game will, I think, depend on you as an individual.”
Dafoe does not comment in the video; however, he’s seen voicing some intense lines as the intruder. This isn’t the first time he has played a character in a video game before. He worked on Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, and is most known in the industry for his role as Nathan Dawkins in Beyond: Two Souls.
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In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ridley describes the game as, “pretty dark … [going] from being this very joyous, immediate thing to this pretty dark warren of various options. It’s cool because you as the player are learning more, so you’re trying to figure out more.”
McAvoy says in the video that he couldn’t read the entirety of the script, for it was impossible. In the article, he says that, although you have choices and make everything happen in Twelve Minutes, “your choices are so limited and you’re on an avenue and you can’t really branch off. In this one, you have a very small field of play, but the options within that field of play are almost infinite.”
Twelve Minutes has been developed over the last seven years by Luis Antonio. Now creative director on the upcoming thriller, Antonio has worked as a lead artist for Ubisoft and on the art of Jonathan Blow’s The Witness.
Twelve Minutes is currently slated for a 2020 release on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC.
