Shader isn't Being Applied to Particle System

[dense creek]

This is my first ever blender project and I'm trying to recreate some of the rendered stills from Polyfjord's video where he tries crashing blender with a bunch of cubes. From what I can tell I have pretty much copied everything from the video but no matter what I've tried my particle system seems to be stuck with either the default cube look or more recently this wireframe look. I've followed other tutorials online for particle systems and the result I always get is either a solid color particle system or the emitter is a solid color but the particle system stays as the default cube. at this point I'm convinced its some setting for blender as whole I just don't have turned on or its a setting in windows, I'm running the base version of blender 3.6.1.0. Thank you in advance for any help you can give.

[stray lark]

could you show what the Render and Viewport Display menus look like in the particle system settings?

[dense creek]

are these the menus your referring too?

[dense creek]

After 2 days I finally found the one thing I needed to change which for some reason the other 2 tutorials I watched on colored particle systems did not include. All I needed to change the render engine to cycles, I just knew it was something dumb