Thanks for the detailed review!
Yeah, I may have gone overboard with the red herrings lol. A lot of things that seem like red herrings end up being relevant in some way, but not all. I was basically going for a bit of information overload so it wasn't obvious what was significant, but I may have overdone that.
It was tricky enough to get a coherent story in the limited amount of time. I didn't feel like I had time to make interactive dialogue like you suggested, but that would be cool for a project where I had more time.
The addon is called Rakugo. It's pretty straightforward to use and saved me a lot of programming overhead.
I have no art skills and couldn't find good character art so I figured background images would make the visuals less boring (and help people keep track of what question they are on). You're the first one to say you felt like that detracted so I'm not sure how common that opinion is, but that's good to know. I wonder if you would have rather had it with just the tavern background and no other images? Also, I think when I was adding backgrounds I was thinking kind of like Oxventure D&D does: