minor ledge
I was reminded of an old point-and-click adventure game called Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek that had a very similar premise to HN2 and a similar mechanic where you had a pinboard in your main hub area that showed important stuff for the player. Unlike HN2 though, I think the way this was used in *Enigmatis *was far more interesting as you actually had to collect evidence from around the town and manually sort it out on the pinboard to figure out the story and your next objective.
I say this because in HN2 Quentin, for a journalist, doesn't really do many journalist things aside from being punched by locals. Like, he spends most of the game collecting things like news articles, photos, cassettes, missing posters etc and yet just...doesn't use them for anything. He doesn't use the photo of Ted's family to learn more about them, he doesn't go after any kid on his posters except for Aaron, and a lot of other stuff he collects is basically just used to segue into the nightmares. And the stuff that is on the board is literally just telling you where to go next.
So to fix this, I think by having a pinboard system like the one in *Enigmatis *would make the game and story feel just a little more intuitiveand make it feel like you're solving an actual mystery instead of just having the game tell you "go to X location and grab a random item".
karmic owl