How Long Does Twelve Minutes Take to Beat?
Image via Luis Antonio

How Long Does Twelve Minutes Take to Beat?

Time shenanigans are kind of like the temporal equivalent of non-euclidean space. To be more specific, a time loop can only last 12 minutes from an outside perspective, but from the perspective of the one in the loop, it could be hours, days, or even years. Kinda spooky, huh? On that subject, how long does Twelve Minutes take to beat?

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Right off the bat, I can tell you how long Twelve Minutes does not take to beat: 12 minutes. While the events of a loop need to progress in a very particular way to get our protagonist, the unnamed husband, out of his temporal nightmare, they can only progress on that pathway with knowledge that he himself obtains. So even if you know what’s supposed to happen, the story can’t progress until he knows, and putting that knowledge in his noggin may take a little while.

How Long Does Twelve Minutes Take to Beat?

By the estimates of the game’s creative director, Luis Antonio, it should take a player approximately 6-8 hours to properly beat Twelve Minutes, and that’s assuming you’ve played your fair share of adventure games and understand the basic mechanics of time loops. 8 hours translates to over 40 full loops of the 12-minute scenario, if you were curious, and that’s only assuming each one takes the full 12 minutes, which they definitely won’t, as the surly police detective that introduces the husband to his good friend mister fist usually shows up around 3 minutes in.

If you’ve read a walkthrough or watched someone else play the game, fore-knowledge of the solutions will likely cut that time down, though you’d be doing yourself a disservice to play the game like that. 

Author
Image of Daniel Trock
Daniel Trock
Since the first time he picked up a controller as a child, Daniel has been a dyed-in-the-wool gaming fanatic, with a Steam library numbering over 600 games. His favorite pastime, aside from playing games, is doing deep dives on game wikis to learn more about their lore and characters.