YMMV / Twelve Minutes

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The 911 call operator. If you have the sense to dial her, she calmly says that the police will be on their way in 15 minutes and tells him and his wife to get to a safe place. A more charitable view is that she really can't do anything but calm down the man. Or...she is in collusion with the cop as is the police, implying that they are willing to cover up a Dirty Cop causing a murder.
• Ass Pull: The Reveal Twist Ending that the couple are long-lost half-siblings, the husband/brother was the one who killed his wife/sister's father (who would also be his father too), and that he completely forgot about those details because he was hypnotized or repressed those memories became a dealbreaker for many players for the overly soap opera-esque direction the story took.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The last portions of the game are filled with dramatic reveals such as Surprise Incest, you being the murderer and not your wife/sister, and implications that the entire game was a part of the hypnosis, which many players found hard to buy.
• Critical Dissonance: Most critics gave the game favorable scores for the intriguing mystery and unique form of storytelling, something a lot of players believe the game didn't do the best job at both.
• Disappointing Last Level: Most of the game's criticisms come after convincing the cop the wife didn't kill the father and having him leave - only for the game to loop once more. Before then the game is fairly well paced and the solutions are fairly intuitive. This is also the point the game's story becomes controversial, not to mention how it starts to suffer Ending Fatigue.
• Genius Bonus: The "art" next to the refrigerator is actually a message in morse code: "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."
• Just Here for Godzilla: Part of why the game got attention was for its casting of Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy, and Willem Dafoe.
• Narm: You're still in control most of the time, meaning you can bother your wife, hide in the closet or cheerfully eat cake alone and she or the assailant won't react to it, which can create some major Mood Whiplash depending on the timing.
• Questionable Casting: Why Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy are voicing US characters is a bit strange, particularly when Ridley has a very distinctive voice and has the most trouble maintaining her accent. Given that their use of an American accent makes their voices rather hard to recognize, it makes you wonder why they went to the trouble of invoking Celebrity Voice Actor in the first place. Averted with Willem Dafoe, whose voice and distinct Je Ne Sais Quoi are immediately recognizable.
• So Okay, It's Average: When all is said and done, the game has good ideas but they are bundled in with so many strange narrative and gameplay decisions that the game can come off as mediocre.
• Special Effect Failure: The angle of the gameplay typically means you don't see the faces of the characters, so they don't emote at all. This means the few times you can see a character's face as they talk, you only see a blank expressionless face with no mouth movement.
• Squick: The revelation that the husband and the wife are half-siblings has certainly shocked the players.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some players feel that the story would have been more interesting if The Reveal doesn't exist and the game remains a murder mystery with a supernatural twist all the way through.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: As divisive as the story is, the main cast puts in convincing performances, with Willem Dafoe being a stand out.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Over the course of the game, it's revealed the wife killed her father and is concealing a pocket-watch she stole from him, though she refuses to admit to either of these things when spoken to, even if the husband is supportive. Even when handing over the pocket-watch could seemingly save her husband from being killed, she refuses to do so. Later on, when it's revealed that her father survived being shot and it was actually her husband who killed her father in more accidental circumstances, she immediately turns on him and refuses to hear him out, trying to have him arrested by the murderous cop.

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