There are autosaves located in the Q section of the loading screen.
Try using one of those to load the game.
It's good. I managed to get out of it my not clicking anything like you said during the time they were in their towers. Still, that was a pretty awful experience with how unintuitive it felt to get the Struggle button to activate. Now I just need to max out Glace's relationship and figure out what to do in the Mushroom Forest and how to kill that boss that keeps running away