Twelve Minutes: Ending Explained (Spoilers)

Twelve Minutes is a new interactive thriller game from Annapurna Interactive and Luis Antonio. It tells the story of a man trapped in a time loop and is forced to relive the same evening over and over. The story is extremely compelling especially as you dive deeper into the mystery behind the wife’s backstory and the reason why the cop keeps coming after her. If you’ve already beaten the game and you’re wondering what the deal is with the ending, here’s our take on what the ending of Twelve Minutes was about.

Do be warned that we won’t shy away from spoilers, so don’t read this if you want to experience it for yourself.

Twelve Minutes Ending Explained (Spoilers)

The more you probe into the wife’s past, eventually the man finds out that she had shot her father before running away from home. However, when the man ambushes the cop, it’s revealed that the father died on New Year’s Eve, and not on Christmas Eve, which was when the wife shot him. This means that someone else had killed him. The cop also reveals that the father’s last words were just “Monster.”

The deeper the man digs into it, he also finds out that there’s a possibility that it was actually the wife’s half-brother who shot the father. The father had an affair with the nanny, and she gave birth to a son. The wife’s mother used to refer to him as a monster, so it’s likely that it was the half-brother who killed him.

In an attempt to find out who the half-brother was, the man probes both the cop and the wife to see if they could remember anything about the nanny. The cop doesn’t remember much and just says that she was named after a flower. The man remembers that the wife wanted to name their unborn child Dahlia, after his mother, and when probed again, the cop reveals that Dahlia was indeed the nanny’s name, which makes the man her half-brother.

After this realization, the man finds out that he’s been suppressing the memory of him shooting the father when he forbade him from interacting with his daughter. The man is able to break out of the loop by retrieving the father’s pocket watch, as the hands start turning backward and he goes back to the last conversation he had with the father.

At this point, the player is able to either decide to leave the wife alone or insist to be with her, which results in the father’s death. If the player chooses to be with her, the loop simply resets and the game continues. If the player chooses to leave her alone, the credits roll, though you can still load up the game to find the man alone in an empty apartment. The man still has access to the pocket watch in the apartment, which means he’s able to go back to the final conversation again and choose to be with the wife, which takes him back to the loop.

It seems to be implied that choosing to leave the wife alone is the canon ending, as that actually lets the man break out of the loop. However, the fact that you can re-enter the loop suggests that perhaps there’s no escape for him after all.

That’s all you need to know about the ending of Twelve Minutes. Be sure to search for Twinfinite for more tips and information on the game, or leave a comment down below if you have your own interpretation of what the ending was really about.