Thank you for the in-depth look! I appreciate it alot :D. Yeah a major thing that led to some of the problems was not enough playtesting and some last min changes in the last second. To give some insight into things:
1) You are absolutely right about the item system and detection. It definitely needs some major improvements,
2) You are right about the text feeling a bit slow especially with the amount of text we have. But, clicking should just skip the typing and give you the entire text block.
3) Keeping the puzzle design simple was an intentional choice on our part as we wanted more people to experience the whole story rather be stuck figuring stuff out. But that failed due to point 1 XD. Also adding more stuff would just increase the artist's work load which was already quite alot.
And again thankyou for your insights. This helps us improve what we do in the future.