Twelve Minutes: James McAvoy And Daisy Ridley Explain The Game's Looping Script

Twelve Minutes, the upcoming adventure game from Annapurna Interactive set inside a time loop that players experience repeatedly, has some major Hollywood stars in it--James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe. Now, in a new behind-the-scenes video, McAvoy, Ridley, and creative director Luis Antonio have talked more about what to expect from the game.

Antonio says that originally the game was smaller in scope: "It was going to be a short game, and I was doing everything." However, he eventually realized that if he could "go a little further," things could get more interesting, and more options would be available to him. According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Antonio started working on the concept back in 2013.

The video, below, shows that while Ridley and McAvoy recorded together, they did so while separated by a barrier. Dafoe recorded his lines separately in Rome. According to McAvoy, the game is "about the danger of truly examining within," and Ridley says that the game is about how you deal with your own truth and the truth of those around you, saying it will mean "different things for different people."

In the game, McAvoy and Ridley play a married couple who are attacked by Dafoe's detective--but you can break the cycle, and ultimately save yourself from death, by using the knowledge that you gain on each loop. The clips of their performances in the video above show off some of the game's dramatic moments.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the final recordings between Ridley and McAvoy happened in August in a London recording studio. Antonio is in San Francisco, and directed the two actors through Zoom.

In the studios, face masks are required for everyone aside from the actors, and daily temperature checks were implemented. In the Entertainment Weekly piece, Antonio also addresses the possibility of the game coming to other platforms after its 2020 launch on Xbox and PC. "I would wait and see how everyone reacts to the game," he clarifies--which means that it's a possibility if the game does well.

Twelve Minutes will come to Xbox Series X this year, alongside PC and Xbox One versions.