Either pause the game, which makes the game more accessible to people in time-sensitive situations such as playing on mobile or child care, or provide a note to players when the menu is up that the "Game is not paused."
#The game does not pause when the menu is up.
umbral fossil
ember oyster
Going to have to hard agree with this. The accessibility needs to be there in case something happens while your playing, hitting the pause button during solo play and stepping away only to return to be back at the hub is extremely feelsbad. Please add the ability to actually pause 
weak mountain
truthfully I would also love this feature, our biggest hurdle with it right now is that (and you may have noticed this when alt tabbing) audio does not get along with pausing. Its not something we can do before EA - but it's on our radar.
umbral fossil
truthfully I would also love this feature, our biggest hurdle with it right now ...
Glad it’s on the radar! For now adding text to the menu to set expectations will alleviate some frustrations that arise.
When pausing is added, it will feel like a nice added feature rather than a pain point
terse compass
@weak mountain requesting an update on this situation as to whether it is being worked-on edit: just saw the update in the other thread here: #1337137969076637877 message
also audio pause/resume can be done fairly easily in most game engines, I can point the team to some tutorials if it will help