I start the game from the shortcut on the desktop, there is some eerie music playing and what appears to be a 4:3 black screen. Nothing can be seen other than a couple of white lines on the left and right of the monitor, where they would appear if the game run in 4:3.
No matter what I press the game doesn't continue. I have to kill the process to proceed to Windows. Which is the good news. This only happens now that I have the very latest drivers. Before, I had the drivers released in August and the game would cause a BSOD.

Running Windows 8.1 64bit All the updates.
And yes, my system can handle the game just fine.

Problem fixed. I found the solution.

I won't go through the steps.
Just the solution.

First run the game with the integrated gpu (intel cpu in my case), the game will run properly. Go into visuals menu and change fullscreen to off. Vsync to off. Might as well change resolution to something other than the default 800x600

Save the changes and quit the game.

Then run the game with the dedicated gpu (nvidia 980m in my case). The game will run properly.