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Time-looping drama Twelve Minutes comes out this August

Time's nearly up

Oh hey, that time loop puzzle game about the husband, wife and policeman finally has a release date. During the Microsoft and Bethesda E3 showcase, they revealed that Twelve Minutes will come out on August 19th. It's about a husband (voiced by James McAvoy) and a wife (Daisy Ridley) who experience a home invasion over and over again. Only the husband knows it's repeating, though.

First announced around six years ago, Twelve Minutes follows a couple stuck in a time loop, reliving the same day in their dimly-lit apartment over and over again. It's not a nice normal day, however, it's a day where their home is invaded by a policeman voiced by Willem Dafoe.

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Twelve minutes seems a little darker than your usual Groundhog Day-style story. Sure, lots of these sort of stories have lots of murder and trauma, but Alice Bee reckons there's a bit more horror to this one.

"Twelve Minutes seems to lean into the horror of an endless time loop," she wrote in her Twelve Minutes preview. "The hallway carpet in your apartment block is the same as the hotel in The Shining, which definitely feels like it's holding up a sign reading, 'Creeping dread and fear ahead'".

The game was supposed to come out last year, but was delayed into 2021. It's being published by Annapurna and directed by Luis Antonio, who previously worked on The Witness.

Twelve Minutes comes to PC and Xbox on August 19th.


E3 2021 may be over but our memories live on - see everything on our E3 hub. Many more big game showcases and streams are still to come this summer, leading up to Gamescom, so see our summer games stream schedule to stay up to date.

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