I ended up using unity and building everything from scratch, partly because I was naive thinking that this type of game would be easy to make. After all, what's there but a few animations and a couple of dialog trees... Oh boy was I wrong!! :)
What saved me though is that I ended up finding really outstanding artists / musicians / vocal actors - all randomly through reddit / discord, meaning it could have gone in a very different direction -- but they ended up taking on all the artistic work from A to Z. On top of being super talented, they were all super accommodating with their craft to speed up the development process as well. It still came down to the wire, and I still wish we had had a few more days of polish, but overall it's only been made possible by the fact that I was surrounded well (see our game credits).
A lesson for work/life perhaps... :)