Loving the story so far. Also question, will you ever plan on replacing the AI art backgrounds with actual illustrations in the future? Personally, it's kind of distracting, but I understand if you neither have the budget nor the time to actually replace it. Everything else about the game is really great, though.
I'd love to have a real artist draw the backgrounds for me, but the game has over a hundred of them. That would take years of work (or a very large team of people working at a reasonable pace) and many thousands of dollars. It's just not an option for me.
But... if any artists out there want to collaborate, reach out to me. I don't want to use AI art. I use it because I have to.
There are some free background packs made for VNs on itch.io too. doggiewoggiez has hundreds of photos: https://doggiewoggiez.itch.io/film-photo-background