gotta say thank you a lot for the time writting the feedback! by the statue in the alcove do you mean the hidden room or the statue next to the bed? guess i had some bad luck in testing, since i knew where all the boxes were the interactive boxes for dialogue and the journal were i did tend to stop just before the soft lock, but i did know that could have come to be an issue, due to the time we had before submitting when i first uploaded the game we found out the game didnt run due to some redirectors on the project (just 1 broke the whole game ahah) so we spent the rest of the time trying to find the culprit and get it working, regarding the lack of story unfortunately that is the scary truth, we did had everything planned out but when we started implementing the narrative onto the game it made us change a lot of stuff and ended up loosing too much time on how we could deliver the narrative and give the player a sense of what was happening there (also something we do want to work on) we thought of making some kind of tooltip overhead on the items or add some sort of "crosshair" that would change colour or simply appear when next to the objects but we ran out of time for that as well 
second part? all of our team is college peeps, so working this one over discord came to be quite a pain because of lockdown, so for second part we will start the production of it and research on what the narrative we made can lead us, but quite possibly starting on the college year we will pump up the production again as we might be able to be all together again! 
possibly before starting the 2nd part we will optimize the first one, make it whole first so we can really feel that this game was finished