Is there a way to stop system time from continuing in a vm?
Check if this KB article helps: VMware KB: Disabling Time Synchronization
That still doesn't completely stop time.
You can't quite stop time, but you can make it go extremely slowly. Set the following in your system-wide configuration file (/etc/vmware/config on Linux; C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini on Windows):
host.cpukHz = 1000
This is probably not all that useful in practice, unless the guest OS has no reliance on any time sources.