I have been testing but unfortunately, haven't been able to reproduce the behavior that you're seeing. I found a few specific actions that can sort of sequence-break the game, but they don't prevent forward progress. I'm sorry you haven't been able to get the intended experience, I will let you know if I do manage to track down and fix the root cause, but I won't be offended if you request a refund.
At this point, I think you've hit some kind of edge case that got your game saved in a broken state. If you haven't tried already, and you want to give it a fresh go, you can try deleting the data via the Playdate settings to start completely new. Settings > Games > Frizzle > Delete Game Data.