Most of the adventure games I've played were built with Adventure Game Studio, which is loosely inspired by Sierra and LucasArts games mechanically. In those, you'd select an item in your inventory, it would become your cursor and you'd click on things with it to interact with them. Interacting with something "out of reach" would usually result in your character automatically walking to it, and then running the interaction as normal.
I definitely get why you decided to limit scope like this. While it feels a bit thin to play, what's there is quite polished, and setting a smaller goal is probably a lot healthier as a developer.