I found another sort of soft-lock bug. After completing the second stage of the neighbor's house, the game directed me to use my laptop again. I did, and it replayed the scene where you look up the evil eve person, then the quest directs me to go to the abandoned house (again, I had previously done this). Candy had no option to talk, only to battle. Did the battle again, completed it, but the quest didn't update, and I still can't access the neighbor's house.
Edit: I tried modifying the save file but despite being labeled as a "json" file, it's actually just a base64-encoded text string that decodes to binary data. Maybe the save files were json once upon a time, not sure, but I'm not going to bother trying to reverse engineer the save format to get unstuck.