Thanks for a detailed comment! I always appreciate those!
I'm glad you caught the "looking at the phone" animation. This was intended exactly in that way- Dick's waiting for your reply. He's self aware enough to know, he needs a research assistant, but that doesn't make him any more patient.
There was one modification, that I dropped early on, that would make the game even more like "keep talking". Originally the game was supposed to have the right answers randomized. This would be easy to implement, but exhausting to test, so I dropped it early on. With the books I took the easy way- you never read the books, but what the protagonist tells you about them. Actual text, with pictures, and animated books would be better, but there was no way I'd make it in time :)
Of course, you mentioning "Keep talking..." makes me think, that it would be cool to make a "research/ investigation" style game, where you can print out the books, that would be available as downloadable pdf (Zachtronics games do that too!).
If you want to read a bit more about the development process, I've just added the devlog to my jam page!
Once again, thanks for playing!