Whole desktop freezing (keyboard and mouse unresponsive, can't ctrl-alt-F3 to switch to TUI either) when playing some Steam games

Hi all!

When I'm playing Noita through Proton Experimental (tried v8.0-2 too but the problem persists), my whole system freezes in two minutes tops while in-game. Audio still plays, but the system doesn't respond to mouse or keyboard inputs (so I can't switch to a TUI to kill the GNOME shell). When this happens, I can only hard reset my laptop.

This started happening with Team Fortress 2 too, although much less frequently. The error persists when running the games in fullscreen and also in windowed mode.

So far, I narrowed it down to it being a GNOME bug or a known issue with Pop!_OS. I tried stopping autostart of the appcenter deamon, disabling all of the installed GNOME extensions, running the games in windowed mode but the problem is still here.

I am beyond confused as to what to do. I'm thinking on dual booting Windows even lol. Can anyone help me?