Love the graphics, love the style, love the sound design, love the writing. Surprised by their ghost affiliation, but I'm on the love side still. Now to the bad and ugly.
The bush hiding key area to roadside discovery is gone, on the one hand this little puzzle did filter a lot of players, including me, but I was sad to see it gone. Removing puzzles to reach lowest common denominator seems like a slide to perfectly mediocre game. There must be a way to include your initial idea with a little twist rather than removing it altogether.
Small UI notes - Pin looks like sombrero ( Might have in-game explanation that I didn't catch ), Save button should have some sort of feedback (Close menu along with 'Game saved' toast). Consistent capitalization - junkyard worker was smol.
Field study section is great addition, along with the new puzzle it does let you dive into a new, bizarre world, not sure how you plan on revealing information inside of field study, single data-dump could be overwhelming and discourage player from riding, additionally new puzzle is closely tied to the field study. For now it's perfectly solvable and interesting, with data-dump it might change.
I've managed to jump into the area you didn't want player to jump, the one initially warded off with boxes, space near the car on the left of junkyard from entrance perspective. On-hover portraits are a great addition, if you ever add difficulty setting, removing them on hard difficulty, and going back to text description could be a great idea.
The pictogram puzzle, logical, solvable, great. It does raise the question, why does Mike feel the need to communicate with his worker using pictograms? I need an explanation even if it's an absurd one, maybe the worker has egyptian background and Mike believed it'd be appropriate to give him tasks with pictograms.
Great game, don't stop working on it.