Thanks for playing! 🧚🧚🧚
As you pointed out, the game never tell you explicitly about certain scenario elements (like what's the link between Helen and David) for quite a while, leaving the players to use their imagination and the few more or less subtle clues to fill the blank.
I also had the impression you were a bit intimidated by the game's scope, which is fair, free time is a precious ressource and this game is hungry for it. If I had to make the same game today, I would probably choose a smaller scope for the starting area, as such a big playing field is long to make both for me and for the player. But now that it is there, I will probably keep it as it is for now.
I will keep in mind the end of cutscene thing somewhere. At first, I used a fade out/fade in to mark the end of most cutscenes, but there were many situation where nothing changed between the fades, so I removed them to respect the player's time. But may be a discrete quick animation like I said during the stream would be a nice alternative to just nothing.
Also, now that I have reviewed the stream, I should probably decide myself if I should qualify both male and female soldiers as either "Soldier" or "Male/Female Soldier" instead of mixing both.