What an interesting conversation! My reply will have heavy spoilers, so beware to curious people who may read all of this.
"If anything I think the game would benefit from a better endorsement at the very beginning of all the "great things" the company does, or says it does, for society so that as the player moves along they can see that that isn't true."
I get your point and you are right. The reason is that our goal/focus was not to surprise the player by discovering that the company was shady, the intro shows already how full of bullshit Lee is, but to find out how shady it is, what is their goal really, and if you can do something about it. But I do think we should keep in mind your point while we work on refining our dialogues. I am sure we can improve the satisfaction feeling of the discoveries even while respecting our initial take. Some dialogues and/or paths are already locked depending on who you talk with, how you behave with them, and how you work on mission. It is supposed to be easier to miss the hints about how shady the company is if you ignore Bernard at coffee breaks, or if you never go back to previous islands. Bernard will never send you the ping where he asks you to join the revolution if you never went to a previous island -- we wanted to add that if you hadn't a minimum of positive interactions with him he wouldn't trust you enough to join him either (but we didn't have time to implement it).
I think we all agree that people from this jam are more likely to disobey orders from the company, we will need to do more playtests with different people to know how players behave and what they think. When we were doing playtests of the first version of the game, we were actually surprised to see a lot of testers during the first whole playthrough (1) were focused on doing their missions on time (2) didn't use all their coffees and/or didn't interact with Bernard, or briefly (3) were tempted to please Lee and ignored Bernard disappearance (4) never went back to a previous island.
(Not necessarily all the points at the same time but still)
We didn't have time to do any playtests with anyone before the jam so you all are actually the first to play this version! It will likely be improved in the upcoming weeks/months thanks to your feedback and others :)!