"You cannot acquire any items because the game file has been damaged."

After leaving MS for seven months, I come back to try out Cygnus and get hit with this error after trying to pick up a doll. The game is telling me to reinstall but as that can take the better part of an hour, I want to see if there's some other things I need to do as well before doing that.

nope, just reinstall

Unless you had an imaging-program that saves 'states' of your computer, there technically is no other way, unless your computer can go back in time 7 months from now, with a error-free installation. I doubt you'd want to do that anyways! Software such as "Acronis True Image"