In case of you were feeling that urge to partake in the flavor of the month and don't want to waste money, the linked thread already has the clean files and crack in multiple posts with multiple DL options.
Repeat after me: Our local Hexbear devs are the only ones that you shouldn't steal from.
Hope y'all enjpy the free game. It's like ark, but for people who value their time.
if you grab the logs, we might be able to help. it's hard to know what's going wrong without them.
I started over and got a bit farther with another download link, got it to actually launch and it asked for vcr so I followed the basic steps (winetricks, set up the prefix, selected 2019 vcr, etc). I failed to download VCR though, the checksum failed which it suggests is due to patches. I'm not sure how to actually get Winetricks to use the right source for VCR
you should be able to update the checksum in the package definition, if you don't want to wait for an update to it