The game doesn't launch even on powerful hardware.

Does it have a built-in video card? There's a risk that the system will default to using it for games, which happened to me once, and that's not good.

I haven't tried manually changing the resolution yet; thanks for the idea. Which files do I need to change?

setvar gfx_resolution = 1024x768

I found this in the game folder: /profiles/default_profile/user_a2.cfg. I assume you don't have your own game profile yet, so you need to change the default one; I might be wrong.