Thank you SO MUCH for letting me know about this! Ive been trying to figure out what that bug might have been all morning - I wasn't able to recreate it exactly on my end but my guess is that it was some kind of memory issue due to the scene's lighting.
I've gone ahead and updated the game with a different lighting system - I think it should run SIGNIFICANTLY better during the exploration sections, and, fingers crossed, hopefully it will fix the issue you ran into for anyone else that plays. Thanks again! And I'll be adding volume sliders VERY soon don't you worry