The adventure game Gabriel Knight 3 has a puzzle that is notorious for being so illogical. The cat's hair whiskers became the evil puzzle to which all other puzzles were compared. I had exactly that feeling many times while playing "12 Minutes."

You come home to your small apartment as a man with no name, and your wife greets you warmly with a candlelit dessert and a surprise. A few minutes later, a policeman kicks in the door, accuses your wife of murder, and strangles you. Entering a time loop, you reappear at your apartment door, still gasping for breath. Knowing what happens next, how do you stop the cop from killing you?

At first, I thought the answer would be to pick apart every action taken by the characters in "12 Minutes," and there was a bit of that in the beginning. I felt clever when I noticed that my wife was thirsty and after a couple of minutes would try to get a drink of water. I could have used that. The light switch in the bedroom was out of order and the cops would turn it on if I lured them in there. This was another small gain. But after a few such basic discoveries, "12 Minutes" becomes almost a rote, incremental game.

It felt like a victory when I first figured out how to knock out the cop and start asking questions, but by the end of "12 Minutes," I had repeated the same steps at least a dozen times, branching out from every decision I could make on the fly to new story paths and I was trying to find a dialogue tree. Toward the end, I clicked for an hour to fast-forward through the same conversation with my wife so I could set up another scene with the cops.

Nothing in "12 Minutes" is as ridiculous as that puzzle in "Gabriel Knight 3," but its repetition ultimately makes the puzzle solving more punishing than the random inventory items of adventure games combined. When I stopped playing one night and thought about how I had spent the last three hours, I was reminded of the scene in "Groundhog Day" where Bill Murray uses an endless loop to plan the perfect bank robbery and then walks away with a bag of cash. "12 Minutes" was not depicted in "Groundhog Day" as a It is a game that depicts the loop before the moment of great success, which was not, and which was probably tried and failed many times over.

The movie wisely skipped that tedium. If a game did that, well, it wouldn't be played very often. But in "12 Minutes," I didn't even feel any joy in return. If anything, I was often frustrated that a breakthrough depended on an item that I had noticed but had not used at the right time, or relieved that I finally got it right after several times of repeating the same action.

"12 Minutes" is particularly frustrating because it offers nothing more than a time-looping puzzle. Even when I get frustrated by the puzzles in adventure games, I know that the reward for overcoming them is a joke or a new place to explore.

Despite featuring big-name actors Willem Defoe, Daisy Ridley, and James McAvoy, "12 Minutes" attempts to portray only the bare minimum of characters necessary for the plot. We learn about the characters' deep, dark secrets, but we spend essentially no time with them in the present. We don't get to ask them "What did you do today?" or "How's married life? "

Each repeated loop was a missed opportunity to include a new line of dialogue or internal monologue for a character. The voice acting was genuinely excellent when the actors delivered weighty lines, and Willem Defoe was genuinely threatening from start to finish.

Perhaps the developers wrote more dialogue to avoid confusing the player or costing too much to produce, and ultimately made "12 Minutes" bare bones. Whatever the reason, in the end, despite the game's desire for emotional impact, nothing stuck with me, and the ending was so contrived that I was tempted to uninstall the game with Alt+F4. However, "12 Minutes" also negated my satisfaction by glitching during the ending, causing the screen to go black while the audio played. The save file disappeared.

This was not the only glitch I encountered with 12 Minutes. There was one other crash, and several instances where a cop's pass got stuck and left him awkwardly walking on the spot after I handcuffed my character to the floor. James McAvoy may have begged for his life with his heart stuck in his throat, but when he tried to talk to the cop, he was met with "Sir." There was very little reactivity in his dialogue, so he had to try to convince his wife that he was in a time loop, make himself look like a full-blown lunatic, and "Never mind. Never mind, let's have dessert. I have noticed that some of the other lines in the loop assume I have said something that I have not actually said.

These are minor things, but in a game where the majority of the game is dialogue and character moments with big emotional swings, sudden tone shifts and choppy animations can break the mood. There are some things I liked about "12 Minutes," such as the art style and top-down perspective. I also appreciated the ability to move things around the apartment and flush things down the toilet, even if it was pointless.

12 Minutes is an ambitious game for a small development team, but it is ultimately constrained by its main idea. I arrived at almost every solution by slightly altering the same few actions, but there was little of the creative deduction and observation that good mystery games like Return of the Obra Dinn excel at. Even when I felt I had solved the puzzle, the satisfaction faded as I repeated the solution.

After "12 Minutes" glitched and I deleted the save, I opened the game folder on my SSD and found a log file, which contained a list of all my actions and the corresponding bits of game code. Reading that code revealed that the faceless husband and wife had names and did not appear in the game. In the end, "12 Minutes" at least gave me one secret that I really enjoyed discovering.