I never played it beforeNot sure but my best guess is some weirdness from persistent data if you played an old version on the same PC, particularly if it was in the past version of Python. You could try to go into c:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\RenPy\RefugeOfEmbers and delete everything in there to reset the persistent data and saves. You'll need to have hidden folders viewable to find and get into the AppData folder. Also make a backup of everything before you delete it if you want to keep your saves but if they're really old they'll be buggy.
I wanted to play the previous version and I couldn't either because of the same errors