Hmm, that worked for me as described in n the walkthrough I think. Apologies for the dumb question, but you’re checking the Center-West station, not Central-South, right? It also probably needs to be day, if you’re checking at night for some reason. Not sure what else to try, sorry!
This is really useful from both of you, thanks! There’s evidence the snag I hit was reproducible and bypassable. So either it’s a tricky edge case to check or a blind spot.
I’m enjoying things so much I may just restart and try again and see what works. I have ideas of what might need to be done, when.
My initial hypotheses would be
if you play the dice game too soon, or if you go back and play the dice game after the woman in the lake tells you she is going west.
Also, maybe cycling a day in your room causes unexpected instablilty.
Either is something that could trip a game flag or game state.
The other thing that occurs to me to try before restarting is seeing if you can make progress on some other puzzles in case they act as triggers that aren’t mentioned in the walkthrough - now that I think about it, in between talking to the woman and meeting her at the station, I’m pretty sure I visited the inventor in the southern part of the city, and maybe even did a step or two of the puzzle chain that kicked off. But unfortunately this was the first game in my queue so I played it long enough ago I don’t remember the exact sequence, sorry!