[1] The game takes place almost exclusively in a small apartment suite and requires the player to repeatedly play through events of a 12-minute cycle to try to solve a mystery.

Twelve Minutes is played from a top-down perspective and is set in an apartment suite shared by a husband and wife (voiced by James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley, respectively) which includes the main living and kitchen area, their bedroom, a bathroom, and a closet.

Time resets at the point where the husband enters the apartment, with the player now free to attempt to work out why the cop suspects the wife of murder, how to prevent her arrest, or several other possible actions in order to find a way to end the loop.

[3] While the main loop lasts only 12 minutes in real time, the game is expected to take a player between 6 and 8 hours to complete.

Years later, during a heated argument on Christmas Eve, she accidentally shot her father with a gun and ran away, afraid of the consequences.

[6] Initially he had envisioned a game that took place in a small neighborhood over the course of 24 hours, but this proved to be too large in scope for himself, and he scaled it back to a single apartment suite and a much shorter period of time.

However, in the intervening years, António brought on a team of five to help refine the game, as well as obtained publishing support from Annapurna Interactive.

[11] As he finalized the game's design, António took a reductionist approach, removing gameplay elements to focus on the essentials he wanted.

[2] Voice acting for the game was provided by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe as the husband, wife, and the officer, respectively.

[12][2] Annapurna Interactive helped with casting as well as finding safe locations for them to record lines which came just as the general world lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic had started.

[36] Some reviewers expressed strong criticism of the amount of domestic violence, particularly that is forced onto the wife in order to progress in the game.

Renata Price of Kotaku stated that while it was possible that a story could include this type of violence if it was well crafted, its inclusion within Twelve Minutes was "pretentious and exhausting", and considered the twist ending "terrible".

[39] Twelve Minutes has been considered a fresh take into the ‘point-and-click’ genre using a very small space for exploration[23] with the ability to tell a story in a unique way.

[40] IGN's Ryan McCaffrey compared it to a "fresh twist on the genre" and flipping the traditional point-and-click adventure on its head[29] while GameSpot's Andrew King saw it as "mechanically rich while encouraging creative thinking".