i dont know if you still follow up on this, but i just bought the full game, and had the exact same thing happen to me. idk if i can muster going through the whole game again to that point. what a bummer.
The game should auto-save at quite a few points before that. Do you have autosaving on? Also what build of the game are you using? I've implemented a number of fixes for this in the past couple of years.
