Tribeca Festival 2021 Included Games in the Official Selections

There are 9 games on Tribeca's list and those include The Big Con, Harold Halibut, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Lost In Random, NORCO, Sable, Signalis, The Songs of Red Dead Redemption 2, and Twelve Minutes. Games are often just as (if not more) picturesque and intricate in the way the events in them untangle as films. You can definitely see cinematographic elements in many games and the basics of creating a plot for a game are similar to those used in the film industry.

One of the most intriguing titles presented in the Game section of the festival is Twelve Minutes developed by Luis Antonio. The main characters were voiced by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe which makes the connection between games and films even tighter. 

The story is fairly simple, and the main characters are no superheroes, they are a husband and a wife trying to have a romantic dinner when suddenly a police detective breaks into the house, accuses the woman of murder, and kills the couple. As soon as it happens the man finds himself in the same situation and returns to this exact point of the evening where everything goes wrong in just 12 minutes. Every single time the loop repeats, the character remembers everything that happened before and the ultimate task is to break the horrific cycle (if that's even possible).

The publisher behind the twisted mind-blowing game is Annapurna Interactive which is known for releasing games that take the player way beyond the regular run-find-shoot-collect experience.

"There's a spectrum. You have movies on one end where you're passive and then on the other side, you have the 300-hour video game experiences that have strong narratives and casts. We're really trying to get something in between," commented Luis Antonio in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

This is the first time in 20 years that the festival changed its name from Tribeca Film Festival to Tribeca Festival implying that it is expanding the list of genres it celebrates. This is also the beginning of the Tribeca Games Award (which went to a pixel-art gothic adventure game NORCO this year).

"What we really want to enhance is the intersection between the mediums. I always say it's not just games at the festival, it's how games will change or are changing the form of storytelling altogether," said Casey Baltes, the vice president of Tribeca Games.

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