Mean.Jim: I'm at the point in the main quest where I'm looking for Ruby. I've tracked her down to a building, but I failed the rolls to get in, both the ladder and doors near the drain pipe. After trying the doors, Kim said something like we should rest and try later, so I went off and finished a few side quests. I don't know if it was a timer thing or something else I did, but that check eventually re-opened. My chance to open the doors was really low (17% I think). Even though I have a +3 to the check, my skill is at 1 because of a penalty from a thought, but I have an item boosting it +1 which is canceling it out. I do not have any skill points available to forget thought or raise the skill, which I don't want to do anyway because it's not a skill I want my character to focus on, and I like the bonuses from the thought. My chance to climb the ladder I think was higher, but I will need to find a way to unlock it too.

I've backtracked all over the place looking for anything I can do. Either I'm missing something or I'm screwed. The only quests I have not completed are the ones related to the church (helping the woman with her research by retrieving a data cube from the fridge, and helping the ravers set up a club). I can't complete the raver quests because I agreed to help the woman with her project and she would let the ravers move in. I can't retrieve the data cube from the fridge because I failed to open it. The skill check for it was still impossible to pass even though I have the tool she gave me (and I equipped it), and wearing gloves gave a +1 boost. I had already unplugged the fridge on day 2 before even getting that quest. The check improved by +2 for being unplugged when I tried to open it. I assumed leaving the fridge unplugged would increase the chance the longer it's unplugged, but it's been unplugged for 4 days now and the check it hasn't unlocked again.

I had to read a book to get to the end of the day because I couldn't find anything else to do. Now it's a new day, but nothing has changed. I still can't complete any quests because all of the skill checks are locked, and I can't find a way to re-open them.

Don't post any spoilers. If there's something I'm missing, just tell me to keep looking. Otherwise, I think I have a save from before re-trying to open the door. I'll have to save scumm to pass the check (which I shouldn't have to do) and then re-do everything I did between then and now.

Mean.Jim: I already finished the game. I had to re-load that save until passed the check. I did a search and found a few people on other forums that got stuck exactly where I did, and that was the only option. I found a list of things that modified the roll for each way in the building. If I remember correctly, there is only the one for the ladder (+2 from seeing the guy in the church), and there are five that each give +1 to the door (each one involves a quest for opening a door). I already had three of them, and the other two were locked out for me. Even if I did have the other modifiers, I think that still would have left me with a low chance (20-30%) to succeed.

I'm lucky that I had that save to revert to. Besides the auto saves and quick saves, I made a save at the beginning of the day (overwriting the previous day's save), and had 3 regular saves that I overwrote the oldest each time I saved. It was my beginning of the day save that I had to revert to, which meant re-doing a good bit of a day before save scumming to enter the building.

This seems like a huge oversight by the developers to let you get locked out of finishing the game without a game over screen. Given that there is always a 3% chance to fail any roll, you could potentially lock yourself out earlier and never know it. I didn't get the body out of the tree until the 3rd day. There were several chances to re-open the skill check for it on the first day, yet I failed each time. On the 2nd day it re-opened and gave it a +1, and I still failed with a +80% chance to pass. It unlocked again on the 3rd day with another +1, which I think had me at the max of 97% chance to pass. I did pass that, but I wondered if it would keep unlocking each day if I kept failing.

The shivers check on the mural before getting the two options to enter the building has something like 10 ways to re-open that check, giving you a total of over +20 modifier, making it nearly impossible to fail it. There should be more options to re-open these other two checks, and if you still somehow fail, the game should detect that you can't go on and present a game over screen letting you know rather than wasting my time running around trying to find a way to re-open it.