I guess in its current state, the game needs internet because it needs to contact tasofro's servers (even if I don't know why it needs to). And when the game freezes, that's because it can't reach tasofro's servers.
And within regions where tasofro's IP is blocked, the game can't reach tasofro's servers, and so the game freezes.
But yes, we can't exclude the fact that the IP block was intentional, and the game freezing without an internet connection may be only a side effect of this IP block.
Maybe we will see in the next update. They may fix that, and if they do something like keeping the connection but checking if the computer have internet before doing so, the possibility that this is an IP block will still be there.
On another note, tasofro seems to have stopped releasing updates for now, so we'll work on updating the english patch for the new game version. And I'll update the thing I made to remove the IP block as well.