I'm sorry that you had this sub-par experience with what seems to be the first game you try on GOG, or at least one of the first. GOG is usually a good store, with decent customer support (well, working support, which is more than what other digital video game stores offer), great games that -- mostly -- work right out of the box and a great community. Now, I'm not being paid by them to 'plant' this post, it has been my genuine experience with them, so far.

Memoria is an awesome game (not the best point & click adventure out there, definitely, but a good one, nonetheless), and I experienced no crashes or major issues when playing it; I don't think it has anything to do with you trying to run it on Windows XP, but PC gaming can be finnicky, if you could provide us with more info on your system specs (CPU, GPU, RAM), we might be able to think of a solution for this problem you're experiencing.

If you can't run the game in a proper condition and don't feel like working with us on this subforum to try and come up with a working solution, consider contacting GOG Support; if they can't get your game to run, you're entitled to a refund (provided you purchased the game in less than a month). GOG Support may take a while to get back at you, but they tend to be really good at solving problems customers have with their GOG games, and if you can't get it to run, no matter what, they'll either refund you the money or exchange the game for Store Credit, which you can use when buying other GOG games.

I understand these kinds of situations can be extremely frustrating, but I would advise you to stick a while longer, since GOG actually offers great games -- all DRM-free --, no shady business practices, reliable tech support and an awesome community all around.

On a side note, GOG pays no one to plant reviews on the games' pages; I agree those reviews tend to be biased, but it's mostly because there's no curation of reviews whatsoever, and fans of the games (without even having to own the GOG version) can go in there and write the most nostalgia-imbued review, which in turn gets upvoted by other fans of the games. The opposite is true, as well; as long as it is an indie/modern/recent game, the majority of the GOG community frowns upon it and tends to give it average-to-bad reviews. I would recommend you to takeGOG game page reviews with a pinch (or even a whole bucket) of salt.

Thanks for the advice.

I did a bit more digging and it looks as if my graphics card is below spec for the game: it appears to require OpenGL ver 2.0 with 512Mb RAM on the graphics card, and I only have ver 1.4/384Mb (it was quite a game in itself to find that out!). Accordingly the makers of the game say on their website, they aren't prepared to help me out.

Pity GOG's all-singing-all-dancing downloader doesn't check these things out before allowing you to download...

I don't feel inclined to upgrade my graphics card just for this one game, so best to mothball it I think - until my next desktop PC which will probably be W8. I could check out the laptop (which is W7 and more recent) but I don't really want to play on the laptop.

Boomer