Program usually freezes seconds after starting a game, without any user activity. I could click the button that advances the help text about 0-4 times before this happened.

I tried almost all standard Proton versions. The only difference I observed was that with the ancient Proton 3.16, the game doesn't even start. I also tried Proton 7 with launch option "PROTON_NO_D3D11=1 %command%" simply because that seems to be a standard tweak that I have often seen.

For most attempts I set all graphics sliders to minimal effort and turned the music off. But the only thing that seemed to help temporarily was closing the help window (if I got a chance to do it before the game froze). This bought me a couple of minutes for getting accustomed to the user interface (without actually playing) before the game displayed several uncaught .NET exceptions and finally crashed instead of freezing.