I wanted to play RIFT, but I can't get it to work. After installing it, the only thing I see is a throne room with a nice music. There's a cursor, but nothing else. No key seems to work, either.

I've tried the following:

1. Nuke & reinstall (multiple times, with re-download of 10+ Gib of "patch").
2. Restarting the computer.
3. Searching the RIFT forums, support and google in general. There's a mention of someone having similar problems, but that is a red herring.
4. Changing server, windowed mode.
5. Downloading (apparently) different versions of the bootstrap client (RIFT-Install-0-98lu20.exe and RIFT-Install.exe).
6. Accessing as a guest and as a registered user.
7. Made sure I have a working OS with enough horsepower

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX Gaming graphics 4095 MB Total available graphics memory
Primary hard disk 131GB Free (349GB Total)
Windows 8 Pro

I would assume there's a way of actually playing this game. Has anyone experienced this and found a way of fixing it?