Thank you ScootaKuH for this wonderful comment - much more than a comment! I'm really glad you liked it!
You said that it's exactly the kind of game you had hoped to see - ME TOO! No joke, adventure genre is my favorite. I hadn't planned on making a game - I was just checking Pulp out and I got obsessed!
THE ENDING - yup, that is the end. It goes out very quietly. ;)
There IS another game in the works - same type of world but bigger, more varied and with more stuff to do... extra skillz and things to pick up along the way. Maybe it's a... PREquel? I'll probably dive into the meat of the project this winter.
AND... the shoehorned crank issue - Exactly. It just never really made sense as the game came together. There is one place (generator room) that would make perfect sense to use it - and that was the plan, but it felt like it was being tacked-on, like that one instance would scream: LOOK, HERE'S THE CRANK PART... so I ditched it.
Again, thanks so much for this comment, it means a lot to me!