This is a very solid start to a very ambitious project. It wouldn't even occur to me to try and make an open world game for a jam. I probably spent more time playing it than many of the other entries, but for me there were 2 key issues which held it back:
The first issue was lack of tutorialization.
The second was the inventory system.
I believe that my objective was to grow cacti, which I was able to do by dumping water near the pots. What wasn't necessarily clear to me was what I was supposed to do with them after that. I eventually came to believe was that, in order to sell the cacti, I needed to do fetch quests for the various NPCs scattered around the game world.
It took me a fairly long (10-15 mins maybe?) time to find an item which I could tie back to a specific NPC (Howie's Glasses). During the search I had found a variety random items and collectables. Unfortunately this is where the inventory system started to be a drag, because in order to get to Howie's Glasses to turn them in, I had to scroll past like a dozen gnomes that I collected, some letters, pots for growing cacti, etc.
After I turned in the glasses, Howie said he would do business with me, but, with the clunky inventory interface and the lack of clarity regarding how to actually use the items to accomplish my goal, that was about as far as I got.
I believe this could easily be resolved by making collectables vs quest rewards be handed differently. I'm not sure if there is a reason for the collectable gnomes to be sitting in an inventory slot, as opposed to just being a count in some variable somewhere. If those collectables do need to be in an actual inventory slot, then ideally there should be an interface which allows me to visualize the entirety of my inventory and activate any item therein. Another option would be to set up your quest-giving NPCs to iterate through all slots in inventory checking for their quest item rather than just checking the active slot. Or set up your inventory slots to have a quantity associated with them, rather than having multiple slots which are all filled with 'gnome'.