Video Game / Twelve Minutes

These are gonna be the longest twelve minutes of this man's life...

Twelve Minutes is a top-down interactive Thriller Point-and-Click Game developed by Luis Antonio and published by Annapurna Interactive about a man stuck in a ten-minute time loop.

A husband, the playable character, returns from work to his apartment to have a nice evening with his wife. They are interrupted by the arrival of a man claiming to be a police officer. He enters their home; disaster ensues, and once it gets bad enough, the husband suddenly finds himself at the entrance to the apartment just when he entered. It becomes clear that he is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop; as soon as ten minutes pass, he is knocked out or dies, or he attempts to leave the apartment, he's immediately rewound back to the start of the loop, and no one but him seems wise to it. He must figure out the truths about his wife, who this police officer is and what he wants, and how he can escape this loop.

It features the voices of James McAvoy as the husband, Daisy Ridley as the wife, and Willem Dafoe as the cop.

Twelve Minutes was released on August 19th, 2021 for the PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.

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Twelve Minutes provides examples of the following tropes:

• 555: Bumblebee's phone number is 413-555-0193.
• Abusive Parents: Your wife's father hit her, which lead to her grabbing a gun and shooting at him. He also violently attacks you, his son, after you refuse to break up with his daughter AKA your own half sister. This time the ensuring Gun Struggle kills him.
• Actor Allusion: One of the possible names for the nanny the cop gives is Daisy. As in Daisy Ridley, who voices the wife.
• Accidental Murder: The first flashback to where you are interviewed by the Father and the two of you get into a Gun Struggle which gets the Father killed by a bullet going off accidentally.
• Action Survivor: The husband is very much not an action hero; any attempt to physically confront the assailant will end in failure. He must use his guile and wits to outthink and outplay.
• Affair? Blame the Bastard: After she realizes that there is a bastard in the picture, your wife's mother starts on this while the baby is still in utero, constantly calling it a "monster". Learning that monster was her father's last word causes your wife to immediately realise that his killer is her half brother.
• Affectionate Nickname: The cop calls his daughter "Bumblebee".
• All Just a Dream: Played with. The "Mindfulness" ending implies that the events of the whole game were just fictional scenarios thought up by the husband after learning from his father that he's been dating his sister, which would explain the time loops and the Mind Screw listed below.
• Ambiguous Ending: While the "Mindfulness" ending implies that the entire game is inside the husband's mind, we don't know anything about the state of his life in the real world. How much of his illusion is based on reality and how much is just pure fabrication? Is the couple already together or is he just learning about the truth before they start dating? Is "father" a random therapist or is he really his father?
• Amnesiac Dissonance: When the heroic player character realizes that he is guilty of Accidental Murder and Surprise Incest.
• Antagonistic Offspring: The Wife's relationship with her father ended up in the gutter after her mother's death. Because The Wife never forgave her father for knocking up her nanny and causing her mother's downward spiral. This antagonism eventually culminates in The Wife shooting her father after the two get into a physical argument.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you try calling Bumblebee or the healthcare insurance after knocking the cop unconscious, you will remember the phone numbers in subsequent loops, so don't worry about having to memorize them or writing them down somewhere.
  • In the "Alone" ending, if you want to go for the other endings for full completion, you can find the watch in the bathroom vent again and set the minute hand back two minutes, returning you to the confrontation with the father where you can choose your ending. Be careful, however, as choosing the "Continue" ending undoes all of your progress and the watch will revert to how it was earlier in the game.
  • Leaving the apartment restarts the loop early, serving as a sort of reset button if you mess up a step in a path.
  • Hiding in the closet before your wife leaves the bathroom is necessary to learn the location of the watch when the cop arrives. To prevent you from waiting out the entire loop, after a few seconds, the protagonist mutters, "And now we wait..." and the game skips ahead to the cop's arrival. A similar time skip occurs if you convince your wife of the loop, tell her about the cop, and select the dialogue option to wait for his arrival. You can also choose to fall asleep on the bed to skip time.
• Babies Make Everything Better: Averted.
  • The Wife taking up so much of their mother's attention lead to her father having an affair with her nanny, which tears the whole family apart.
  • The birth of the husband kills their mother, and ultimately sets in motion the chain of events which end in him killing his father and committing Surprise Incest.
  • The Couple's baby only brings bad tidings, considering it's the product of half-sibling incest.
• Bald of Evil: The cop is bald and will frequently find any excuse to resort to murder, regardless of whether it's necessary.
• Berserk Button: No matter the situation, if you ask the Cop about his daughter he will take it as a Relative Button and go at you instantly.
• Blatant Lies: If the husband talks about the wife's past before first convincing her of the time loop, she will deny and deny everything.
• Big Bad: The cop is the one antagonizing the husband and wife, and the player's main objective is to stop him from doing so.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • In the "Alone" ending, the husband agrees with his wife's father to break up with her, thus avoiding the tragedies that would've followed if he stayed with her. In the epilogue, the now-single husband finds himself in his apartment again, now completely devoid of furniture and alone.
  • In the "Groundhog" ending, the man chooses to stay inside the loop and plays out the same happy evening with his wife over and over again, having learned how to stop the cop from even coming. However, they have no future and the man always breaks down once the loop restarts.
  • In the "Mindfulness" ending, it's implied that the whole game is a hypnosis session or a dream where a man imagines different scenarios of how being with his sister would turn out. This means that none of the tragedy of the game actually occurs, although the man still has to struggle with his feeling for his sister and the game ends before we actually know whether or not he gives her up in the real world.
• Break Her Heart to Save Her:
  • In the "Confessed" route, the husband admits the truth to the wife so he can take responsibility for his action. This reduces her to a sobbing mess by the end, but the cop will leave her alone.
  • In the "Alone" ending, the husband decides to break up with his current girlfriend/future wife to prevent incest and the tragedies that will come from staying together.
• Chekhov's Gun: Virtually every detail of the apartment comes into play.
  • Sleeping pills? To drug your wife's mug so that she won't interfere with anything.
  • The fake candles? Light up the vents if you can't see what's inside them.
  • The book that your wife is reading? If you read it while she's unconscious, you can recite a quote from it when you talk with her dad to unlock the secret ending.
  • The baby clothes? Have a name on them, which is used to get the Cop to remember the identity of the Wife's old nanny.
• Clear Their Name: You can prove to the Cop that your wife didn't kill her father by presenting a Convenient Photograph taken of her hundreds of miles away at the time of his demise.
• Closed Circle: Any attempt to exit the apartment will end with the loop resetting and the husband finding himself at the apartment's door once again.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The protagonist can seriously wound the cop in an attempt to get more information out of him by shooting him in the leg.
• Contrived Coincidence: We are to believe that the player character and his half-sister who never met before have randomly met and fallen in love in their twenties. Then again, stuff like this has been known to happen in real life... Less believable is that, on the same night the wife decides to announce her pregnancy, where she conveniently names the baby after the player character's mother, their father's friend bursts in looking for the wife's watch, with the baby name providing a clue as to why he's there in the first place.
• Convenient Photograph: The polaroid on the fridge proves that the wife wasn't anywhere near her father at the time he died, so she couldn't have killed him.
• Cradling Your Kill: After giving your wife a Slashed Throat, you cradle and hold her until she collapses on the floor.
• Dance of Romance: You can engage in one with your wife, provided you haven't revealed anything to her about either her or your Dark and Troubled Past.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Hoo boy... The wife's father was murdered eight years ago. The cop was a friend of his who was witness to his final moments and is firmly of the belief that the wife did it, so he feels justified in robbing the couple and stealing the pocket watch to finance his daughter's cancer treatment. Then it turns out that her father survived a week after the wife attempted to shoot him, and he was instead killed by her half-brother, a product of the father's affair with her nanny. Then it turns out the half-brother is you.
• Death by Childbirth: The Nanny died while giving birth to her son. She doubles as a Missing Mom for the protagonist.
• Death by Falling Over: The Father in the flashback gets into a struggle with you only to fall and break his neck.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you drug your wife but spend long enough talking to her in the living room, she'll collapse to the floor rather than excuse herself to the bedroom to sleep. However, if you hide in the closet when the cop breaks in, he'll still check the bedroom for other occupants, so you can still use the lightswitch trap on him.
  • After finding out that you are your wife's half-brother, you enter another loop, allowing you to complete the requirements for the other endings, including the "Confessed" ending (which is the only window of opportunity for this ending).
• The Dog Bites Back: Your wife kills her father when she shoots him after he gets violent with her. Ultimately subverted with the reveal that the shot just badly injured him.
• Driven to Suicide: It's possible to stab yourself or shoot yourself with the cop's gun, killing yourself.
• Dying Clue: When the Cop found the Father on New Year's Eve eight years ago, the last words coming out of his mouth were "Monster, monster..." which becomes a vital clue in the investigation.
• Earn Your Bad Ending:
  • In the "Confessed" ending, you confess to your wife and the cop (after having been talked down by Bumblebee) that you are the wife's half-sibling and the murderer of your guys' father. The both of them turn their anger towards you, though the cop merely says that he'll deal with you later rather than violently attack you and the wife tells you to Get Out!. This ending is only obtainable after the first confrontation with the father, by which you'd likely have either gone with the "Alone" ending (which prevents the tragedies in the first place) or the "Continue" ending.
  • In the "Coward" ending, you drug your wife, shock the cop, and cuff him while he's unconscious, but you tell him you'll cooperate and give him the watch. Afterwards, he'll kill your wife and orders you to tell 911 that it was a suicide, though he also tells you that You Have Been Spared.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In the "Groundhog" ending, if you select the correct dialogue choices to Bumblebee, she will successfully prevent her father from entering your apartment. With the threat gone, you enjoy a happy evening with your wife... oblivious to the truth.
• Easter Egg: In the "Alone" ending's empty apartment, you can find the pocket watch in its old hiding place in the bathroom's vent, but its minute hand is completely broken. If you manually move the minute hand to 2 minutes before 12 you can go back to the confrontation with the father and undo the ending.
• The Elevator from Ipanema: The muzak playing while you are put on hold at the health insurance hotline.
• Epic Fail: The first time you try to kill yourself with the gun, the protagonist winds up bungling it and suffers for several seconds instead of it being an Instant Death Bullet. When the next loop starts, he laments that he "even screwed that up".
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: While the assailant is ready and willing to kill the wife for his own ends, it is revealed he has a daughter who is on health support.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even the murderous cop is taken aback by the idea of a son killing his father and marrying his sister.
• Evil Wears Black: The cop is dressed all in black, down to the Conspicuous Gloves.
• Failure Is the Only Option: If you give the watch to the cop, he'll strangle you anyways for reasons unexplained, probably out of Revenge or to Leave No Witnesses.
  • There is no ending where the husband is happy. He either breaks things off with the woman he loves and ends up alone, futilely erases his memory (which just leads to him falling in love with her again), stays in the loop and lives out the same 10 minutes over and over again, or snaps out of the dream/hypnosis and faces the real world, whatever that may hold.
  • Even with the benefits of a time loop, it's impossible to beat the cop in a straight up fight using the knife. While you counter more of the cop's attacks with each attempt, the most you can do is stab him and stop him from pulling out his gun...before he overpowers you with five hard right hooks anyways. Any attempt to fight him after that will have him knock your ass out with a single punch, not even letting you swing the knife from the first attempt at fighting him, and the husband telling himself to try something else.
• Foreshadowing: Even when you first start the game up, there's no "New Game" button, just "Continue". On top of that, the clock is running counterclockwise. The "Continue" ending has you wipe all your memories, resetting your save data and putting you right back at the beginning of the game... with the "Continue" button, implying this has happened before. Complete with the visual of the clock running counterclockwise as the credits roll.
  • Despite the game's title, the time loop is only 10 minutes long. The missing two minutes are your meeting with your wife's father, and they're the key to ending the loop and the cause of the whole conflict.
• Frame-Up: In the "Coward" ending, the cop kills your wife in her sleep and tells you to tell 911 that it was suicide.
• Gainax Ending: In the "Continue" ending, after reciting the quote from the book and making no choice about how you'll deal with your relationship with your girlfriend/sister, the dad hypnotizes you into forgetting, leading back to the beginning of the game.
• Get Out!: Your wife insists you leave the apartment for good in the "Confessed" ending.
• Golden Ending: Downplayed. The "Mindfulness" ending is achieved by asking the father to erase the husband's memory and staring at the clock for the remaining two minutes. The father commends the husband for his active imagination but tells him that he can't obsess over his wife forever and to wake up. This brings you back to the main menu but with the "continue" button missing, implying that the husband has finally escaped the time loops.
  • The "Listen" ending may be the closest the game has to this. The wife takes the husband out to talk about her past, thus preventing the cop from finding them and the husband from learning the painful truth. The loop does not start in this ending.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: An even shorter one than usual. The protagonist has ten minutes to interact with his apartment, wife, and their eventual assailant before the evening completely resets outside his Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory.
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the achievements have only the loosest descriptions to tell you how to get them. They mostly involve looking at different items around the apartment after certain plots points; some of the paintings change on subsequent loops and the plant in the bedroom grows flowers after certain endings.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Your wife's father. Him being unable to control his temper lead to him being shot by both of his children.
• Healthcare Motivation: The Cop is willing to murder people in order to pay for the cancer treatment of his daughter.
• High-Voltage Death: The bedroom light switch has faulty wiring. It will send a shock knocking out the husband or the cop if it is flipped on for the second time. However, if the wife flips the switch on for the second time, she will die from it since she's the only character who isn't wearing shoes and isn't grounded from the electrical current.
• His Name Is...: In early loops, your wife is about to reveal the location of the watch as the cop strangles you but you die and snap back right to the start of the loop before hearing the crucial info.
  "The watch is in the-"
• Hope Spot:
  • It looks like you are getting your wife out of harm's way by making her leave the apartment in distress. However, before long she gets returned by the Cop.
  • When you knock out your wife with the sleeping pills and then hide in the closet, it looks like the Cop is leaving the apartment without making any trouble. But then he stops in his tracks at the front door and decides to search the closet also.
  • There's a scenario where you manage to tell the Cop the truth about the Father's death and he leaves, watch in tow, you and your wife hug it out...and the loop starts over again.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: You can turn the tables on the Cop by knocking him out with the light switch and tying him up with his own zipties.
• Hypocrite: The wife. When she believes that she killed her father through the intentional act of shooting him, she makes all manner of excuses for herself. Yet, when it's revealed the husband is the actual killer as the result of an accident, she refuses to listen to him and tries to have him turned in to the cop.
• I Didn't Mean to Kill Him: Your wife explains how killing her father was just A Tragedy of Impulsiveness and that she never planned for it to happen. Subverted when it turns out that she didn't kill him, to begin with.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: The husband certainly believes so in the "Continue" ending where he asks his father to erase his memory, presumably of his sister/wife as well as the events of the game as a whole.
• I Hate Past Me: Immediately after regaining his memory, the husband seems disgusted with the idea of incest and pushes the wife away, implying that even he finds his past self's obsession with his sister abhorrent. It's only after this that he can make the choice to really let her go.
  • Notably, she stops being called 'Wife' and now you identify her as 'Her', after you learn the terrible truth.
• Impersonating an Officer: The Cop gains access to your apartment by posing as an actual cop.
• Instant Death Stab: Downplayed. Your wife dies some twenty seconds after getting stabbed by you in the stomach. After two times of doing this, you switch to a Slashed Throat.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Played Straight in the "Alone" ending. The husband agrees to never be with his sister, thus preventing her from ever suffering the tragedy of their relationship. Subverted in the "Confessed" ending, as the husband only confesses the truth after getting her pregnant and living together for 8 years. She is understandably not any happier after this.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: When you hide in the closet and watch the Cop deal with your pregnant wife handcuffed and helpless on the ground, you are forced to watch him kick her in the stomach twice.
• Killing in Self-Defense: How the actual murder of the father happens. Unable to convince his son to stop pursuing his daughter, the father pulls a gun on the son and gets shot by it in the ensuing struggle.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the flashback where the Father kidnapped you and tries to break up your relationship with his daughter, he muses about how it would be nice to go back in time and try again but that's not how life works.
• Leave No Witnesses: The Cop seems hellbent on not letting you or your wife live after he got what he came for.
• Memento MacGuffin: The cop demands a pocket watch from the wife; finding out the reasons for its importance, and her reluctance to discuss it, form a big part of the mystery within the time loops.
• Meaningful Background Event: You can hear a police siren going off in the background before the cop arrives, likely from the cop's car.
• Meaningful Rename: Once the husband figures out that he's the half-brother of his wife, her name changes from 'Wife' to 'Her'.
• Mind Screw: The ending. You apparently flashback to when you spoke with your and your wife's father eight years ago about your relationship with her and how he doesn't approve, which results in a violent altercation that kills him. Then you find yourself back in the present, stare at the pocket watch now going in reverse, and find yourself back in that moment again... except apparently as an alternate timeline, where the two of you had a civil conversation and you either decide to keep dating her or break up with her, which has the further choice of keeping your memory or get your memory of her wiped. Except according to your wife, you and she never met until after she tried killing her dad. And then there are his comments about getting the wife pregnant, something that only happened in the future...
• Mind Screwdriver: The "Mindfulness" ending appears to be this, with the father implying that the events of the game were just a figment of the husband's imagination all along.
• Minimalist Cast: There are three main characters with two more characters having speaking parts over the phone.
• Morality Pet: Bumblebee. If you convinced Bumblebee to talk down her dad, he will allow the wife to explain herself and he'll decide against stealing the watch, as he doesn't want his daughter to think of him badly.
• Multiple Endings: Seven in total, with four of them actually ending the time loop.
  • Listen: At the start of a new save file, if the husband doesn't do anything upon entering the apartment, he and his wife will talk before she grabs the pocket watch and leaves the apartment with the husband, preventing the time loop altogether.
  • Coward: The husband cooperates with the cop, giving him the pocket watch and helping him stage the wife's suicide. The cop leaves without harming the husband, but the time loop continues.
  • Groundhog: The husband calls Bumblebee and convinces her to talk to the cop, stopping him from entering the apartment. The husband and wife have their romantic evening in peace, but the time loop continues.
  • Confessed: After The Reveal, the husband confesses to the wife and the cop that he is her brother and her father's murderer. The cop is given the pocket watch and he threatens the husband before leaving without any further trouble. The wife demands the husband to get out of the apartment, continuing the time loop.
  • Alone: The husband uses the pocket watch to go back in time and agree to break up with his future wife, ending the time loop. He lives in the same apartment in the future, but he is all alone with no furniture or electricity.
  • Continue: Same as the previous ending, except the husband uses the passage in a book to ask the father to erase his memory of his sister and the events of the game so far, creating a Stable Time Loop on top of the 10-minute one the husband was trapped in and erasing your save file.
  • Mindfulness: Same as the previous two endings, except the husband decides to stare at the clock after asking to have his memory erased. The father tells the husband to stop believing all of these stories and to let go of his obsession with his sister, suggesting that the events of the entire game (time loops and all) was just the husband imagining what may happen if he decides to break up with or continue dating his sister. Getting this ending removes the "continue" button from the main menu, implying that the husband has finally broken out of both time loops.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The Husband gets hit with a major one after The Reveal. The next loop after he finds out the truth gets abruptly cut short thanks to him passing out from the shock and horror.
• Mysterious Parent: The Husband's Missing Mom ends up being the woman who The Wife's father cheated with...and got pregnant.
• Nameless Narrative: None of the main characters are ever referred to by any name.
• Never Suicide: If The Cop only kills The Wife, he stages her death to make it look like she shot herself.
• Oh, Crap!: It's possible for the husband to stress out or upset the wife enough that she will leave the apartment, where she will then encounter the cop and attempt to cooperate with him. However, if this happens after he proves to her that he's in a time loop and explains what the cop wants with her, she will instead gasp in horror upon meeting the cop in the apartment hallway.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Subverted. If you shoot the cop in the leg to get him to cooperate, after you're done with your questions, he'll ask to be taken to the hospital, as he's bleeding out. If you continue to look around the apartment, his pleading will get weaker and weaker. If you untie him, he will die immediately.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: While James McAvoy has a better hold on his, there are times (particularly when the wife is experiencing stress) when Daisy Ridley's native British accent comes out.
• "Open!" Says Me: Locking the front or bathroom doors doesn't deter the cop; he'll just kick them down.
• Parental Marriage Veto: The Wife's father is not too keen on her getting with The Husband. Because he knows that the couple are half-sibilings.
• Police Are Useless: If the husband dials 911 to have the police arrest the man, the fastest time will be 15 minutes, far longer than the loop. Not to mention that the man himself is a cop.
• Pragmatic Hero: To learn the right things, the husband has to do some very shady things, like drugging his pregnant wife or shooting an unarmed and restrained man.
• Press X to Die: If you try using the knife or a spoon on the faulty light switch, it will kill you instead of knocking you unconscious.
• Red Herring: The ventilation grids in the bedroom and living room, your wife's house keys or the flushing toilet turn out to be non-essential for solving the game.
• Reincarnation Romance: No matter how many times the main character has his memory wiped in the past, he will always find the wife and fall in love with her again, thus resetting the time loop. The only way to end the loop is for him to accept that things between them will never work out, or if one follows the interpretation that All Just a Dream, wakes up.
• Repressed Memories: It's left unclear whether the player character actually remembered being the wife's half-brother and killing her dad for all these years or if he suffered some kind of amnesia that erased the incident from his memory. The "Continue" ending implies the latter..
• Resurrection/Death Loop: Once you die, you loop back to the beginning of the story.
• Revenge: The cop wants revenge on the wife for supposedly killing her father, who was his friend. This includes killing her even after getting the watch in the "Coward" ending, and you for being connected to her. He'll only spare you if you both give him the watch and help him frame your wife's death as suicide in the "Coward" ending.
• Ridiculously Long Phone Hold: Trying to call the cop's health insurance provider results in being put on hold, always being given the option to hang up after each receipt of the message. Even if you dial it as soon as the loop starts and hold all through the night, you never reach an operative.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: You are the only character remembering details of previous time loops.
• Rule of Symbolism: The clock/pocket watch. It's tracking the husband's progress in finding a way to break out of the time loop with a gold pattern on the bottom edge of the clock face that rotates to the top whenever he hits a milestone in his attempts.
  • When the husband learns that he married his own sister, the clock spins counterclockwise until the day of the murder eight years ago is reached, rotating the first piece of the pattern into place. The husband is regaining his memories of what happened that fateful day.
  • When the "Alone" ending is achieved, the clock breaks, the minute and hour hands lifelessly pointing at the six while the second hand spins counterclockwise, rotating the second piece. The husband may have broken the time loop but he is not truly free, as there is nothing to do in that empty apartment save for adjusting the pocket watch's hands so it can take him back in time once more.
  • Finally, when the "Mindfulness" ending is achieved, the clock freezes in place, continuing to read twelve-o-clock as the final piece of the pattern lines up with the rest. The husband is finally free of the time loops.
  • At the start of the game, the player can see two apartments next to the couple's one. The left apartment has a baby crying in it, symbolizing what would happen if the husband chooses to withhold the truth and stay with his wife. The right apartment is noted to be empty, symbolizing what would happen if the husband stop the relationship and end up alone.
• Self-Made Orphan: The Wife killed her father when tensions ran high between them in the aftermath of her mother's death. Later loops reveal that she only badly wounded him, and ran away before she could realise.
  • The birth of The Husband kills their mother, and they later wind up accidentally killing their newly discovered father.
• Shout-Out: The carpet pattern in the hallway is a nod to the Overlook hotel in The Shining.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: It takes some preparation on the player's part (getting the cop's daughter to convince him to abort the theft, mostly), but the husband and wife can have a perfectly happy evening together, cooing lovingly all the while as they eat some dessert, dance together, and curl up in bed to snuggle. Then again...
• Slashed Throat: If you keep killing your wife by stabbing her, you eventually switch from a stomach stab to slashing her neck, causing her to die quicker.
• So Proud of You: The Wife's father takes this attitude towards The Husband, his son, if the Husband agrees to break up with The Wife after finding out that the two of them are half-siblings. Complete with tearful hug.
• Spoiler Title: The time loop is ten minutes which is strangely at odds with the name of the game. By the end, it's clarified that the title is referring to the ten minute time loop of the main scenario, combined with the two minute time loop of the flashback scenario.
• Stable Time Loop: The "Continue" ending implies that the husband forgetting that he murdered his own father/father-in-law was due to the husband going back in time and asking the father to erase his memory, effectively trapping the husband in a time loop within a time loop.
• Starcrossed Lover: The couple turns out to be brother and sister all along. The husband's attempt to avert this trope and stay with his sister anyway is what drives much of the main plot. The loop can only be broken once he realizes that things between them can never be, or stay ignorant and forget the truth.
• Surprise Incest: It turns out the husband's mother, Dahlia, was the mistress of the wife's father, meaning that the couple are actually half-siblings. The player can choose whether he'll tell his wife in the past that they're breaking up because of this or omit it, though we don't see this happen.
• Take a Third Option: How to get the "Continue" ending. By telling the father he wants to just forget the whole thing, he obliges and wipes his memory. To mark how much of a third option it is, it's not even on the tab and it is done by waiting out the dialogue, which often isn't a good idea.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: If either the husband or the wife drinks a mug of water spiked with sleeping pills, they will pass out.
• Trust Password: You can gain your wife's trust by revealing details about the murder of her father which only she knew.
• Unknown Relative: The turning point of the game is the reveal that The Husband and Wife are long lost half siblings.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • If you use the knife on your wife or the cop while he's tied up and/or unconscious, you'll kill them. The game even acknowledges this when it comes to repeatedly killing the wife, as the husband will get better at killing her the more he does it; going from sloppily stabbing her in the stomach to slitting her throat for a quick death.
  • You can claim to the cop that you're innocent and that the blame is fully on your wife.
  • While the game doesn't directly acknowledge it, there is nothing preventing you from down sitting at the table and eating cake while your wife is loudly sobbing and having a mental breakdown on the couch in the same room. The player character will even default to his cheerful dialogue on how good and tasty the cake is.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Eating dessert without your wife, opening the pocket watch vent in her view, being upset about having a baby, or talking to her about bizarre and sensitive subjects without convincing her of your case will upset her and cause her to call you out. At best, she'll refuse to do anything you ask him to and storms into her room, and at worst, she'll leave the apartment and run into the cop early.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: If at the very start of a new game, the player doesn't do anything, the game ends without any time looping. The husband and wife have a nice conversation, she grabs the pocket watch, and they both leave the apartment in less than five minutes to go talk, meaning the husband never enters a time loop.
• With My Hands Tied: The Cop can overwhelm you with a headbutt even when his hands are tied behind his back.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: If you call Bumblebee to get her to talk down her dad, then your wife and the cop will be able to have a civil conversation about why he's robbing you and the circumstances of her father's death. It seems like a happy ending, with the wife willingly giving the cop her father's pocket watch to help pay for Bumblebee's medical finances and discovering that she has a long-lost half-brother from her father's affair with the nanny... and then you find yourself back at the door of the apartment again, back at the start. The game doesn't even count this scenario as an ending.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: Do too much to unsettle your wife or if you uncover the pocket watch within her view and she'll leave the apartment upset, forcing you to confront the assailant early and probably forcing a reset when you're not able to talk him down without her help.
• You Monster!: The wife's mother called her husband and Nanny's baby that. Later, your wife calls you this again when you reveal the murder and Sibling Incest to her. There is also a great blink-and-you-miss-it moment for this where you, instead of using one of the knives, shoot the cop in the leg while interrogating him; he will say "you're a monster..." over and over while he's slowly bleeding to death if you leave him talking for a while, foreshadowing what you did to your own father.
• You Shouldn't Know This Already: Zigzagged.
  • Even if the player knows something already before the husband discovered it, the husband won't have the dialogue option to bring it up. For example, if you didn't go through the normal progression of having dessert with your wife and her giving you the present of baby clothes (where it is revealed that the baby will be named after your late mother, Dahlia), the husband won't be able to ask for the name of the nanny from the restrained cop; showing the baby clothes to the cop without being told the name of the husband's mother won't get an answer out of him, versus in the normal progression, you show it to him to jog his memory about the nanny's flowery name.
  • Averted for the location of the watch by the power of the player's Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. You're supposed to hide in the closet before your wife leaves the bathroom, though you can access this by sticking your nose around the apartment without actually having to learn where it is.

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