Awesome game but buggy and no cheats allowed

I was playing story mode and got to a point where I’m supposed to obtain 3 objects to place somewhere after encountering 3 NPCS (I don’t want to give too much away). However, I checked all of the walkthroughs and message boards as I could and I did everything CORRECTLY. The NPCs will not reappear no matter what I’ve tried and the objects they were supposed to leave me are nowhere to be found and I was hoping I could reset my sim but cheats aren’t allowed in story mode.

The worst part? Although I didn’t manually save my game since MUCH earlier in the story, the game apparently decided to save itself so when I closed and opened the game back up, I was right where I was before so I couldn’t even reattempt.

Unfortunately I’ve searched far and wide on Google and can’t find anyone who’s had the EXACT problem - similar, yes, but not exact. It seems to be specific to this release. Everything else is awesome, but it’s unfortunate that I can’t finish my story because of this glitch :(

TheColorBug about The Sims™ 2: Castaway Stories, v1.0.0