Hello there,
whenever you experience a softlock, you don't need to restart, press f1 10 times, talk to the character again and that will let you continue, these are things that are being worked to fully fix. As per the save system there are some issues with it where the continue button doesn't really load the last save but the "biggest number save", to bypass this always save and load instead of continuing, it'll be better with 1.8B as its receiving some improvements.