Shard’s pathway is now open until the split branch in Chapter 17 where you choose either to go after Vengeance or Nick. For this route to trigger, accept Shard’s help to find Nick in Chapter 14, then follow Kenzie down the tunnel in Chapter 15. You should know immediately upon waking up in the lab whether or not you’re on Shard’s route. If it reads identical to the normal underground lab scene, then something has gone wrong and the code needs to be fixed again (and I need to go sob into a pillow).
You may be able to guess Shard’s identity based on info from this chapter. Maybe you know Shard’s identity already. Either way, please keep that secret hush-hush with the exception of spoiler tags in the discord channel.
Also! You can also now escape out the window! This was updated a few days ago but I forgot to make the post (whoops). To my dearest Sally fans: I am sorry. I am so very, very sorry. Please believe me when I say that writing this hurt me just as much as reading it may hurt you. Originally the Window Route was focused on rescuing Kenzie, but this changed two months back after an alpha-tester brought it to my attention that having a Kenzie just rehash Reese’s plan ended up being boring (and a poorer alternative to having to escape). I needed a natural way to let the readers know Vengeance’s plot, and having REDACTED do REDACTED because REDACTED felt much more natural (and also gives non-Vengeance Buttons a way to experience parts of the Vengeance route).
Some people are reporting bug issues with early chapters breaking, which I've been unable to duplicate. My suspicion is that ongoing games are borking either because I’ve been updating the startup file semi-frequently in order to iron out kinks, or because the chapter images are taking too long to load (I might take them out next update link, since the published game will have new chapter slides anyway).
If you encounter a bug, please restart the game from the beginning without using a save to see if the issue persists after choosing the same choices. Switching browsers may also work if you're loath to sacrifice your savefile. I realize restarting is a hassle, but it will allow me to rule out the previous issues that I mentioned, and I’ll be able to fix whatever line of code is breaking things. The code should be solid, but I also can’t count the number of times where I’ve broken everything because I deleted an unnecessary adjective in a chapter and accidentally included an additional space, and thus the entire game was rendered unplayable.