I got it installed through the old installer, the new one refused to install Edge WebView and consequently crashed when I tried to ignore that part. However, the game itself, while starting, does not render correctly, as seen 
.
Tried to run it through Wine-GE as well as Proton but both with the same result.
You probably want to get the new installer working. Try installing Edge WebView via Protontricks before running the installer.
My guess is that the older version of the game is using a really old version of direct X or OpenGL that your drivers aren’t handling well. The newer version, being updated for Windows 10/11, should work just fine by contrast.
What distro do you use? What Desktop environment? X11 or Wayland? What’s your GPU? Which drivers do you use for it?
Protontricks is for Proton games. And without installing the game / launcher I would not have a prefix to install this to anyway?
I think you’re confused. The game does not differentiate between the two launchers. It’s the same game regardless of which launcher you choose. Launchers are merely for downloading & updating games. I don’t know whether it uses DirectX or OpenGL but I know it uses Unreal Engine 2.5.
Bazzite, KDE, Wayland, 6650 XT, Kernel version 6.11.
You can install stuff onto a prefix before installing a game, but fair point about it being for Proton, you’d want winetricks instead, which Protontricks wraps. I do think Lutris lets you setup dependencies before running the installer on your prefix for a new game, but you might have to write a script to do it the way I was thinking.
I assume you’re using the Mesa drivers then. Maybe try the AMD proprietary drivers to see if they’re more compatible with this particular game? Couldn’t hurt besides being a bit of a pain to setup.
Not gonna happen, especially not for one title.