same problem. however, i have two pc's. my desktop is w7 32 bit with nvidia graphics.. and your problem occurs on that computer. if i press the space bar, the screen goes black. the graphics ARE there, but its black... if you manage to find the icon to end the game on the bottom right AND click it (blindly of course) then the "are you sure" window will pop up and you'll have to guess where they "yes" button is... THEN guess where the "do you want to save" "yes or no" buttons are....

but my laptop - W7 32 bit with on board graphics, i have no problems. games starts for 2 seconds with choppy 16 color graphics, 2 seconds later, it flickers and it has perfect graphics. after the game starts at easter island, i press the space bar and it game menu pops up perfectly. "Are you sure you want to quit" shows perfectly,. "Do you want to save" shows perfectly,.

definitely a graphics thing... not sure how to fix it on my desktop... if i discover the fix, i'll post it here.

in case anyone reads this, this sometimes happens to me, specifically when I alt-tab.
how i fix this is: while the menu is open (and thus the screen is black), alt-tab out to desktop.
then, go back to the game. the menu should now be showing, but the colors are messed up.
to fix the colors, i simply click Open Saved Game, and then click Cancel. colors are now fixed.
opening the menu should now no longer show a black screen.

this is just my experience, though. (windows 7 64-bit.) perhaps with a newer windows version or different GPU (settings), it may not work.
but yeah, the above always fixes black screens and messed up colors for me.

I can't even open the menu in my game. Spacebar, like most keys, does nothing.

For anyone trying to install Timelapse, I wish I could give more concrete advice, but the way to get this working seems to be "try different hardware and know how to reinstall drivers". Unfortunately this advice is less than useful to people who don't have computers from all eras just lying around. Here's what happened on the three computers I tried to install this on:

1) Lenovo X230 with Windows 7 (c. 2013): Game ran once, looked terrible. After I started mucking with the compatibility settings (e.g. telling to run in 256 colors), it never ran again, crashing with various errors.

2) Lenovo T61 with Nvidia 140M and WinXP SP2 (c. 2008): Game literally broke my graphics driver, requiring me to reinstall it. That was fun. This happened every time I ran the game.

3) Asus EeePC 1000HA, also with XP SP2 (c. 2006): It worked! Game looks and runs okay - the sound is a bit quiet (probably more the computer) and the game is "stretched" to a 16:10 ratio, but at this point I'm not going to worry too much about that.

What's annoying to me is that the two other old adventure games I've bought from GOG (Zork Nemesis and Lighthouse) both came packaged in VMs (DosBox and ScummVM) and therefore ran perfectly on the Win7 machine; as far as I can tell, this one is trying to run the game on the bare OS, which predictably has poor results much of the time.