The logo screens appear, then the initial loading screen. Files appear to load completely, but then I get the message "caching assets, this could take several minutes." The first couple times I waited a full 30 minutes before Alt+F4, but after that I'd stop at 10 minutes. The game never launched.

Someone reported this in 2019 on the Steam forums:
steamcommunity.com/app/886900/discussions/0/1743353798883243620/?ctp=27#c1638675549013066 869

My PC is between the minimum and recommended requirements.
I'm the sole user and it's not on a network.
No extraneous programs running in the background, including rundll32.
I've run as administrator by right-clicking both the shortcut and the main executable, and by changing the executable's properties. I've also run in Compatibility modes for Win 7 and 8, just to rule it out.
I've tried launching with minimal graphics settings (it always resets to "Good"), and different screen ratios.
I've also tried running in Windowed mode but found that my computer crashed when trying to click outside of the window (totally unresponsive, even Ctrl+Alt+Delete did nothing, I had to manually shut down altogether).
I've uninstalled and reinstalled, and I've uninstalled, deleted everything, and redownloaded the files to reinstall.

Per GOG tech support suggestions, my C++, Microsoft .NET Framework, and DirectX files are all current.
Using default 100% scaling in Display Settings had no effect, nor did installing and loading with a clean boot environment
(support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/929135/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows)

Per dev suggestion, forcing the game to use DirectX 9 didn't work either (add -force-d3d9 to the shortcut's target).
His suggestion from that Steam thread was to try removing XML and the output_log.txt files from %AppData\LocalLow\Inner Void Interactive\Chef_ A Restaurant Tycoon Game, but I found no XML files, and the log file was really only good for showing the dev how many shader errors I was getting (e.g. D3D shader create error for vertex shader [0x887a0005]).

Graphics drivers are as current as I can get. I use NVIDIA GT 730, but it's no longer supported and can only be upgraded to version 391.35.
nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3473/~/eol-windows-driver-support-for-legacy- products

A cursory google search for that shader error shows similar reports with Unity games.

A week later and several hours of trying every combination of with/without forcing DX9, with/without Admin privileges, with/without clean booting, and different resolutions and compatibility modes, nothing's worked. I can only presume it has something to do with the graphics card and the Unity engine, but this is the first game made with Unity that I've tried so I don't know if any others might work.
List of Unity games: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games

Getting a newer card or computer isn't an option for me at this time, so I may try again when a new build comes out and/or I have a better machine. I've edited this first post to reflect what I've tried and what I've learned, in case it helps someone else with the same problem.

I haven't had any technical issues and the "this could take several minutes" part is almost instant for me. This is with R9 390 8GB, 16GB system memory, and a G3900 CPU. Windows 10 2004 and not running as administrator or any other changes to the default install. There are a number of obvious issues in the game, although nothing strictly game breaking that I've hit yet. The closest is that I am trying to get my second star and it keeps failing halfway through the day without any indication why since I more than meet the specified criteria. However, I occasionally get reviews that give a half or one star for service so I'm guessing that the issue is related to that. Those reviews mention that the customer spent too long "waiting to ." There is also simple stuff like a particular button often needing to be pushed several times to have effect.

So I am not surprised if there are technical issues on some systems as well, however the part about your whole system hanging does make me wonder if it is actually related to the game. The game uses Unity so I'm not sure if it is really doing anything unusual. Maybe try leaving a long running memory tester like memtest86 running over night to check your memory? I'm not sure if the caching it is trying to do is a main memory or GPU thing. Are your graphics drivers possibly too current and not the most stable available (if you use Windows Update I think it should be the stable ones)? As another random thought, do you have Steam installed? I see it loads a steam_api64.dll. I don't have it installed but as a random (hopefully unlikely) guess maybe if you do maybe it might get confused that you have Steam but not this game on Steam? I am showing 5.1GB system memory in use during the game so if you are below the recommended 6GB system memory it could be an out of memory related race condition, some Unity games caused issues in that case on Linux on my older system and possibly Windows as well, I don't remember (I was mostly running games under Linux at that point).

Adding that I don't use Steam, and it's never been on this computer.

I have an NVIDIA GT 730, and after a lot of checking yesterday that everything was current, the only snag I found was that my particular card won't update past version 391.35. I don't fully understand everything I've looked at, but coupled with what appeared to be errors using DirectX 11, for the time being my guess is that it's the card. Pending what GOG tech support says, my next step will be to contact the dev to see if maybe it's that and not something entirely different.

Info on support for GT 730 in case someone else has this problem:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/nvidia-geforce-gt-730-unable-to-install-in-windows/d7fcd34a-41f4-450b-bc14-e2c8557fd5cc

I don't see any log files (or xml files) at all in the game directory or data directory so it does sound like a game or GPU driver issue.

Hi, I strongly recommend you navigate to the Nvidia Geforce homepage and select the current drivers for your card manually.
Download and Installtion are fairly easy, if you are not experienced with it (one click installation).

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Select:
Geforce
700 series
your card
your windows system (32 or 64 bit!)
Game Ready Driver
Your language

The file usually is around 500-600MB in size.
Download and start the instalation.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

I'd already done that, it's how I learned my card's no longer supported.

[e] To elaborate, the current version is 425 something, but installation failed with an error message that it wasn't compatible with my version of Windows.

OK, I presumed it can be overrided maybe.

Did you figure out the issue? I also just remembered that at least AMD drivers have some random settings that claim to improve peformance and/or reduce power usage but mostly seem to just mess up some games (although with an older GPU possibly they would actually help in some cases). If NVIDIA has something like that I'd recommend turning them off, at least for this game.