OP is trying stupid things and thinks some trivial advice will fix his rig.
You've got a 5yo office stub of a GPU (well almost) and a decade old CPU (though a high-end one).
No fancy new game is optimized (or even supposed) to work on anything that came out 5 yrs ago and looks like this

He wasn't asking how fast the game would run on his aging computer and GPU.

He was asking whether it is supposed to run at all, ie. are the symptoms he is describing related to e.g. the old GPU, or something else in his system. After all, it could just as well be that even if he replaced his current GT 720 with a RTX 3090, the game would still fail to launch at all because of that same issue he is having now.

Hard to say for sure why the game doesn't run for him, but apparently some other people have been able to launch the game on GT 720, as shown by the Youtube video I linked to.

I am not clear on whether this game requires dx 12 or not, but I have noticed a lot of people having issues running without dx12 GPUs. One guy in particular cannot load the game because his GPU does not support dx 12. So it probably is attempting to load dx 12 libs, and cannot resolve the references.

I suggest either playing on a dx 12 compatible system or refunding if possible.

DX 12 is officially supported by GeForce 9XX cards and higher, but the 7XX cards only support DX 11.

Either that's one fanciful passive cooler or that core got very, very hot at some point.

The game does require DirectX 12 and I finally found where it shows what versions of DirectX your graphics card supports. It is in dxdiag tool that a few people have had me look at, but the DirectX versions is found under Display 1 or 2, tab -> Drivers -> Feature Levels (as shown in attached screenshot). As mentioned by Maxvorstadt, mine only supports up to version 11. This almost certainly is why the game isn't launching. I have purchased a new Graphics Card and will update once I get it installed next week.

Thanks for everyone's help on this. I really appreciate it!

Meanwhile, I was actually surprised how "well" the game runs on my low-spec non-gaming laptop:
Dell Precision 3530
Intel Core i7-8850H 2.60GHz
NVidia Quadro P600 (+ Intel UHD Graphics 630) https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-P600-GPU.302932.0.html
16GB RAM

Admittedly, I am running it at a low 1280x720 resolution and all settings either at med or low, but I was still surprised that the game seems to run relatively smooth, and still looks quite nice.

The game benchmark gave me something like 40 fps average (20 fps lowest, 70 fps highest), and the little I played it (got out of the cave, daddy taught the ginger how to avoid and capture the robots), it felt totally playable. Feels like it is running at constant 30 fps or so, but I didn't check exactly.

Seems to me the game adapts quite well also to lower spec machines, even if it still requires DirectX12 and Windows 10.