You want to replay the best Duke Nukem game of 21st century so you install Manhattan Project, click play, game starts and wave of nostalgia washes over you as you hear the half-forgotten intro sounds.
Menu music kicks in and... bam! No lights. Must be a part of Morphix' energy conservation plan.

If you can start the game and can hear menu music/sounds but your screen is completely black, this is a guide for you.

I was dealing with this exact situation recently on my Windows 11 23H2 computer. I managed to solve it with bits and pieces from few different online sources but I haven't seen one comprehensive guide so I decided to make one for future reference.

There are actually 2 issues:

#1 The game uses DirectX renderer by default, but it wants to use old, unsupported version, hence the black screen.

#2 The game runs on modern hardware at much higher frame rate than intended which leads to various physics/collision issues and makes precise timing of double jumps almost impossible.

First, the black screen. As I said, the game is trying to use old version of DirectX.
Fortunately, it also support OpenGL, which should work fine.
Unfortunately, the launcher that you can choose when starting the game doesn't have a setting for it.
Fortunately, this is a new launcher, not the one the game originally came with. Original launcher is still available and has a setting we need.

Navigate to the game directory (right click the game in your library and select "Manage", then "Browse local files"):



There are 3 important .exe files:

• DukeNukemManhattanLauncher.exe - the new launcher
  
• prism3d.exe - the game itself
  
• MPconf-old.exe - the original launcher

Run the MPconf-old.exe, switch to OpenGL renderer and run the game. The black screen issue should be solved.


From now on, you can keep using the new launcher to change resolution, the game will remember the renderer and will keep working.

Unfortunately there is no old launcher to fix the frame rate. I had to do it through NVIDIA control panel.


Open it, select "Manage 3D Settings" (#1), then "Program Settings" (#2) and select prism3d.exe from the list (#3; it's showing "hunting 4" as a name for some reason).

Change "Max Frame Rate" to 60 FPS or less (I used 60 and it was fine but lowering it to 30 might be better).
Change "Vertical sync" to 'On' (#4).

With that, it's time to de-worm the big apple.

(I don't have experience with AMD GPUs so I can't tell how to do this with them)

With the steps above, I was able to play and complete the game without major issues.
I did encounter few things that didn't bother me but are worth mentioning:
- there were some visual glitches on the player HUD and boss HP bars. I think those are due to stretching when running the game at widescreen resolution.
- sometimes, there was no background video on the level finish screen (it was black, but the stats were shown over it and I could continue).
- some objects had a slightly glowing outline.

If anybody knows how to fix those please let me know in the comments.