Compatibility Report

Okay so. I did a bit of analyzing:

First things first, I can replicate these issue 100%. But another Person who also tried it has no Problems whatsoever. So it seems to be at least partitially depending on setup. I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the other Person runs EndeavourOS. The crashing issues might be connected to the Blocks, so it might be worthwile to first trying to fix the Blocks Issue.

First, the crashing. That one seems to be a Problem with DXVK. I loaded the game outside of Steams Proton with Bottles and there I managed to bypass the Crashing using DXVK 2.0 or lower. So it seems to be a regression after this version. As far as I can tell, Steam Proton bundles different DXVK Versions for different Proton Versions. Proton 8 seems to bundle DXVK v2.1-4-gcaf31033 (according to this changelog: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog#available-in-proton-80). There were also fixes for CJK Fonts in this Version. Either the DXVK Version or the CJK Font changes (I don't know if the CJK Font changes are in DXVK or in Proton) caused the crashing. In Proton Version ≤7 I observe no crashes.

Second, the Blocks. This one might be a Font issue. Now this is getting interesting. The Game loads different Fonts in Steams Proton and in Bottles. And indeed, according the respective Registries, there are different Fonts available. But all major Fonts are loaded in both Bottles and Steam. Now it gets even more interesting. It turns out, the Person who has no issues also has a different font list (that makes sense, they are on another OS). This is their Font List: Working.txt.
The funny part is, every font in their Font list is ALSO loaded in both of my setups (Bottles and Steam): Steam.txt Bottles.txt.
(There are some fonts missing for me, for example the Bitstream or JetBrains fonts, but according to the Screenshot from the working instance, the missing fonts are 100% not the ones loaded in the game). As for screenshots, here is how it should look like, with the seemingly correct font:

And this is my Bottles Version with DXVK 2.0, so that I can actually load the Options menu:

For my Steam version, a screenshot is in the original Issue Post. Without the Options menu, because I took the Screenshot with the default Proton Version, which does crash. But even without the Menu, you can clearly see the font Steams Proton gives the game is a Serif font. That's almost definitely wrong (on a Windows Machine it loads a Sans-Serif font).

If someone wants to read the original thread I created, where I gathered all this information, here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nt1qbz

Tested it on my end and it seems to work fine on steam deck without the text issues or crashing opening options or credits, so its probably related to setup

Full Version works without Issues. so I think this can be closed.