Ya, I had no idea what this was until a player recently reported an issue they had trying to pick up several important items in the game.
It's an extremely rare issue that's only been reported 2 or 3 times in the past; they said they couldn't find the knife in the kitchen in Chapter 1, so I made a manual save for them, and it helped them get past that roadblock. But that was for the demo; it turns out there were several other instances in Chapter 2 where that bug could cause more roadblocks.
Shoutout to the player who reported this to me on Discord. I was only able to solve the issue because of the errors he shared with me as he was playing the game.
So, it turns out it was because of a locale thing, that's why it was so rare. After analyzing the error messages and the pattern of roadblocks he encountered, I realized this method in Unity C# "System.Number.ParseInt32" can return wacky results depending on the computer's locale, so I adjusted the implementation and voila, no more bugs.
This is probably the only soft blocking bug that the game had (as extremely rare as it was), so, hell yeah! The game's completely bug-free now! lol
Now I'm just hoping that fixing this bug didn't introduce another one, which is something that happens quite often during development. So please do let me know if you experience issues. I'm more active on Discord. Thanks.