Literally cannot play the game

[Izzo]

Everytime I try to start the game and select new game and then any difficulty level, the game just freezes. The music stops playing and it doesnt go anywhere. I have to alt tab and close the game. I tried many times, with controller and with keyboard mouse, always the same. Any chance the devs are still reading this forum? I'd hate to get a refund but I literally cant play the game.

[Omega]

Which fullscreen mode are you on?

[SlabakBG]

Same here, tried a few fullscreen / windowed resolutions, no joy.

[Coreymill]

Have you tried waiting forever?
For some reason the game took minutes to start for me and then after the first level was another several minutes of loading. I don't have any idea why the loading is so absurdly long

[superveggie]

2019 ~ My game freezes in second level and still waiting for loading screens from the start. 1080x1920 Game looks great for the price but I see people have technical problems

[Acubens]

Had the same problem. Worked well in a Windows 10 toaster with intel HD after I've set windows 7 compatibility and ticked some other boxes.

[TransparentBlue]

I think I might have found what causes the freezing in some loading areas, having a chrome based browser running in the background.
At-least I think it might be that, seeing as I went from waiting up to 5 min to merely waiting a couple minute to load a save after doing that.

EDIT: Actually I'm noticing that the game is trying to fade to black when it seemingly freezes, and that it seems like it's literally just waiting for it to finish but for some reason sometimes it takes multiple minute to do very progressively then it suddenly does it normally.

EDIT 2: Vista compatibility mode fixed the issue for some reason I'm not even gonna question it, especially when Windows 7 compatibility mode didn't fix it for me (I'm already running Win7 too to begin with)

EDIT 3: Nevermind that's not the issue apparently and I was completely wrong about everything so here it goes the long explanation of what the hell is happening with the freezing
The game absolutely refuse to start on my primary monitor (144hz) and will always start on my secondary (60hz), at first I noticed that if I moved the window back to my primary monitor before the title faded in completely the game would freeze but din't think much of it at that time and I wasn't about to play on the other monitor because the game for some reason is choppy as hell when it does that
So I thought I had fixed the issue at first because I started closing everything in the background while the game was frozen which apparently made it unfreeze, hence why I thought the issue was coming from those but it turned out to not be the case although it did affect the issue a bit in the end.
So then I started fiddling about a bunch of other stuff and got tired of waiting to put the window back on the main monitor and just left it on the secondary and then suddenly it worked mostly fine
So then I started trying again after dragging the window back on my main monitor to play the damn game the issues reappear immediately.
And as it turns out the game simply hates not running at anything that isn't a multiple of 60hz, something about being causes the fade in to stall in weird ways until the framerate fluctuations allow it to advance
And obviously if I disable compatibility mode the issue come back too

So the obvious answer was that I have to run the game windowed (fullscreen makes the game fluctuates around 50fps and looks way too choppy to be playable) on the screen that has the taskbar (if I don't it's choppy as hell) while having either set my monitor to 60/120hz or having the framerate capped to 60/120 via an external utility with the compatibility mode set to Vista / Win 7.

And I also can't use my favorite control scheme for those games because the directional arrows actually have me assuming direct control over crates, and it doesn't save any changes to the control if I quit the game anyways so not gonna bother with that and will just remap via my KB utility
And finally for some reason the game launches via a launcher.exe that as far as I can tell does nothing except eat CPU cycles because the game launches and register as playing in steam even if I directly launch the game via the actual executable (nw.exe)

[Adam Palomaino]

Compatibility with W7, disable full screen optimization, execute nw.exe (game exe) as admin.
Those 3 ticks made the game stable for me so far.