Actually yeah, there's errors in the log when that happens. Here's the one from the slime encounter: https://pastebin.com/raw/dxPtJVMQ
Since it seems like a text encoding issue, I managed to get around it - by running the game under US English locale (my system is in Finnish, and I've now confirmed that the issue happens on both windows and linux). Probably worth noting that the freezes happen at points where the next line of text would have a special effect applied to it, although those used to work in past demos without issues. There's also some other stuff in the game that's affected by locale, like the phone chatlog switching "PM" into "ip." which would be the Finnish equivalent if we used 12 hour clock.
As for the menu, I mean the one you can only access on first start, the one that the game starts into before you have save data. I played around with it some more, and pressing esc seems to work at first, but if you hit it a few times while the resolution dropdown menu is open, then it stops working and you'll be unable to exit the settings menu.
Anyway, I'll probably try out the rest of the new stuff later, now that I found a workaround for the cutscenes.
