I actually spent the night troubleshooting and what I found out was I had the game installed twice, so my saves were on both the old version (pre-DLC) and the updated version, and I had just launched the wrong version of the game, which made the save data incompatible with the version I was running
I bought this game on itch.io when it first came out, and I've done some of the DLC content, but when discussing it with a friend, I was hoping I could look back on it only to find I no longer have the option to point at the announcer and my DLC saves are giving me errors ;n;