The technique for the images/animations took a while to start with, but then I could automate most of it once I'd figured out the process.
The character sprites are clips with greenscreen backgrounds from a stock footage website (stock footage acting is very strange and uncanny, perfect for this game), then brought into After Effects where I resized the image, reduced the framerate, and exported the frames as a sequence of images. Then in Photoshop I created an indexed colour palette with very few colours, and applied it to all the frames of the sequence to give it that crunched-down look and emphasize the pixellation.
The neighbour character is more like an omen or a prophet than a character who has a role to play in the events of the story, apart from being the one who made the coffins for the deceased characters.
Totally agree, subtitles would have been a good idea!