The people at Tales of Tales are artists. Not programmers. They don't know how to program, so that breaks the game if your computer is set up properly to combat malware. No proper program will try to run code out the data area (which used to be a clever thing to do when computers had 128 bytes of RAM), but this one does.

If you've been dilligent and turned on Data Execution Prevention, which enables the hardware support for that, the old lady will just stand there no matter how much you hold down the forward key.

But this game is worth playing, just for the song.

Here's the fix:

Control Panel -> System (or, just windows key + break, a very useful shortcut).

Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Data Execution Prevention

Either turn it off long enough to play the game, or better, Add [steam dir]\steamapps\common\The Graveyard\TheGraveyard.exe as an exception.

There you go, this took longer than it takes to play the game.

You'll know it worked if you don't see the grate when you start.