Alright! Now the game is working correctly, I have no idea what changed, but in all respects it's being less buggy now and I was able to finish it and awaken Cthulhu :D
But as 7ko noted, the game pretty immediately just turns into reading the Success rating and hitting Patience when it's anything but Likely, or I hit Action when it was Likely or Possible (and I always succeeded even with only Possible ratings), not reading the newspapers at all. And I'm still not a fan of the fact that the days tick down automatically like seconds... I feel like it could work better if you actually had to read/analyze the newspapers to make an informed decision, and the days remaining didn't tick down until you chose an option. But then it would have to reduced from 180 days so the game wasn't too long/slow, or skip over longer chunks of time each action, etc.
The art and color palette still looks fantastic!