Thanks so much for the wonderful feedback; I definitely agree with you across the board.
I definitely wanted to implement something to make which characters you could communicate with much clearer. I toyed with the idea of an exclamation point above their head, but didn't like the aesthetic and then ran out of time to implement something else; but I love your suggestion of highlighting them.
The player UI for the Speak was also a little finicky for some reason and I didn't have quite enough time to figure out why; I think overall my method for enabling and disabling it was not ideal, resulting in errors here and there.
Clicking to skip through the text as well is a great idea, and one which I couldn't quite implement due to how i created the text effect--but I'll definitely give that a rethink if I reuse the system as it is pretty essential to make this playable; especially if it were any longer. One of the people who tested it also suggested looping the final text on interact (like dark souls) to make it clear when the interaction was over, which I thought was a nice idea.
And yeah... click definitely doesn't equal consent... haha. I had played with the idea of adding a "Give" UI prompt before the click, as I didn't want to add any more button inputs, but amid the UI issues and the inefficient dialogue system that also got put to the wayside for this version.
I also thought I could have implemented a visual for actually handing over control, as currently it just happens in a flash--something like a UI animation or somehow passing the animal the key... but yeah, couln't quite get my head around it without it looking or feeling quite inconsistent.
Really, thanks so much for all your feedback has given me a lot of food for thought!! :)