press play in GOG, get black screen with the animated loading indicator and crash.
I get no error messages or anything, game just quits.
I reinstalled Save the World and that runs perfectly fine. So....what now ?
Though let's be honest, the Devs will probably never read the gog forums as is par for the course of these small developers so I guess I just refund this. Due to their nonsensical woke censorship in the remasters I am not that keen on supporting them anyways.

fixed it, if anybody has the same problem, go into the gamedir and delete the galaxy64.dll. Game works fine now like the first game which didn't even have that file in the first place.

Not sure if that means achievements or other gog features are disabled now, if they are....refund.

Well, 1.5 years later I rebought it and...still crashes on startup same as before. remove galaxy64.dll and it works but without achievements.
To answer the unexpected developer reply from back then, I always run current drivers (and since then most if not all got updated and this is also a new install of Windows 11).
I only use MS Defender as AV and I get no triggering from that one, but I tried running the game with defender turned off...still crashes.
This is the only game on GOG that ever did this so kinda weird. I wait a couple days for a developer response, else I'll refund again since, well, I can't play the game.

Here's the error in event viewer, clearly states galaxy64.dll as the culprit:

Faulting application name: SamMax200.exe, version: 2021.11.8.22, time stamp: 0x618a068d
Faulting module name: Galaxy64.dll, version: 1.123.0.0, time stamp: 0x5b03eaa1
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000000549a3
Faulting process id: 0x0x39F4
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1D9AC424F3867C0
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space\SamMax200.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space\Galaxy64.dll
Report Id: 7b88875c-84d7-463f-8d03-0eb963f7da08
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Another update, I put the installation folder into defenders exception list and reinstalled the game, now it gets one screen further, instead on crashing on the first black screen with the loading icon it now crashes on the black screen where it says the title of the game.
I tried running it as admin, I tried compatibility mode, nothing works outside of deleting galaxy64.dll

And another update 2 days later. I completely uninstalled gog, deleted all leftover directories everywhere, put the gog directory and the game directory onto the defender exception list. reinstalled everything...still crashes. Kinda doubt it's a problem on my side anyways, since many games have a galaxy64.dll and this is the only one that crashes.

Last Update, tried it on a completely different computer, did all the defender exceptions and stuff aaaaaand wouldn't you know it, it crashes JUST THE SAME.
The game is just broken on GOG, maybe it doesn't like the new intel CPUs with E and P Cores (sorry, don't have access to an older gaming capable computer to test), god knows.
Buy it on steam if you must (I won't, the original version still exists and I already own that), that version won't have a galaxy64.dll to crash the game, though please, I don't want to say anything bad about GOG in this case, it's on the developer alone.

Fix :
OpenSSL* 1.0.2 beta (Jun 2014) to OpenSSL 1.0.2k (Jan 2017) contain bugs that either cause a crash or bad SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) values on processors with the SHA extensions, such as the recently released 10th Generation processor. Both bugs were fixed years ago; however, any application that uses the old version directly, or as one of its dependencies, will fail. Unreal Engine* version 4.13 (Sept 2016) to version 4.21 (Dec 2018) contains the old version of OpenSSL, so any game built using those versions is possibly affected.

Short-Term Workaround
This is most useful for testing or identification of the bug. If the ISV (independent software vendor) controls the process launch 100 percent through a script or launcher, it could then be used as a fix.

OpenSSL provides an environment variable control for enabling features, including one that modifies the Intel® CPU identification, OPENSSL_ia32cap:

set OPENSSL_ia32cap=:~0x20000000
This disables the OpenSSL code check for SHA extensions and runs a different code path that does not contain the crashing bug.

Not the E and P Core error but an even older one, nice work guys.