By default, steam.exe has it's thread affinity set to allow itself and any child processes access to any/all of your system's CPU cores/multi-threads. Generally, this is a sound choice, as it allows both Steam and your games to take advantage of more system resources. However, in the case of this game, having too many cores available can lead to crashes upon reaching the main menu. If your system exceeds the max number of supported multi-threads (31 threads from my experience), you should be able to perform a high-level test by temporarily limiting the number of logical processors available to steam.

To start, navigate to Task Manager>Details. Right-click steam.exe and select 'Set Affinity'. From there, cut back the number of logical processors to <= 31, and then attempt to launch the game from Steam (without closing/re-launching Steam or restarting))

If this does the trick, then we can set Steam to automatically apply these limits to just the game instance itself at launch. To do this, navigate to the game's directory (the folder containing LC2.exe) and creating the following .bat file in the same folder. Name the file "LC2_StartFix.bat" and populate the file with the following:


From there, we want to set Steam to automatically run this .bat file when launching the game. To do this, navigate to the game's launch options (Steam>Library>Game (this game)>Manage>Properties>Launch Options) and set it to the following (also without the outer quotes):

After this, the game should launch normally (as long as you don't have any compatibility options set on the original executable or move/re-install the game). I've personally also encountered this issue with Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and I was able to get it launching with nearly the same approach.

Happy adventuring!

• https://superuser.com/questions/908848/how-do-i-permanently-set-the-affinity-of-a-process
  
• https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3076663294