"I wish I could turn back time..." I thought to myself as I realized how hyped I was for "12 Minutes". From the very first teasers and trailers, I was captivated by the concept of coming back home to our little apartment after work, and being greeted by our loving wife, but with the twist that this pleasant time would only last... 12 minutes.

If you've seen Bill Murray in "The Groundhog Day", you might know what it's like to be stuck in a time loop. In our case, we only have 12 minutes to figure out how to stop the loop from repeating itself endlessly. Unlike Bill Murray's day-long loop, ours is much shorter, but no less challenging.

I really wanted to like this game, but the drag of repeating the same things just made it worse with every loop.

Twelve Minutes, the first game directed by veteran Luis António, frustratingly and miserably uses itself in a narrative and thematic loop in order to achieve unsatisfactory and totally derisory results - even if, above all, it takes itself seriously.

In addition to a plot with several holes and unbelievable twists, the game has one of the worst gameplays Annapurna has ever offered, at least 10 years behind in game design (including critically failing on trivial matters), and never, I repeat, never exploring any of its own points thematically. The loop is a tool, not the object, which is a serious mistake.

This is, of course, not to mention the fact that it doesn't even touch on themes that are crucial to its story, never, for example, mentioning its sadism, violence and abnormality, just accepting them as elements that don't change what it's trying to tell - again, another serious (and, frankly, amateurish) mistake.

If only it made fun of itself, but not even that. Twelve Minutes wants to be taken seriously, very seriously, through art direction that uses morbid tones and cold sets, cinematic acting scenes and, wow, violence and swearing. All of this as if it had no less screen time with minimal depth than its own 12-minute loop, both in narrative and gameplay - it's empty, through and through, however much the passively charming style and dramatic performances may try to manipulate you into believing that it's not.

You, the protagonist, kill all the relevant characters in the game, in one way or another, at one time or another, and the only, only consequence or mention of these events comes in the form of an apology. An apology from the protagonist himself, made hours and hours after the start of the loop - hours that 80% of the time, and that number is no exaggeration, will be incessant repetition without any use.

In other words, it's a game that doesn't even try to care about femicide, murder, suicide or cancer; themes that, since present at alarming levels, could easily be explored to the full, but are treated only as tools to tell a story that doesn't even work in the most basic sense imaginable.

Spoiler warning: Of course, because completely ignoring any emotional sensitivity or social issue was surely the most desirable way to conduct a text about a man who is hypnotized by his father, kills him and marries his own sister, falling, years later, into a hellish time loop to discover that he has done so.

In short: playing Twelve Minutes sucks, with an outdated point-and-click and poor use of the time loop, and what's worse, it doesn't even make a point of hiding this fact behind a minimally decent script - because, in fact, it's as shallow as a saucer. Luis António completely takes away the point of a game being a game and a story being worth telling - especially as he's part of a publisher like Annapurna, capable of casting even Willem Dafoe and giving his protégés freedom of time and creativity.