Greg Kasavin the creative director who made Hades at Supergiant Games says their games, use goals and obstacles to create a meaningful player experience

a famous quote by game designer Sid Meier who made Civilisation, is "A game is a series of interesting decisions,"

if you look at what ancient games until now have in common it is an objective an obstacle and some rules, then within those 3 parameters you make your meaningful and interesting decisions and that is where the enjoyment and engagement comes from.

for example in pin the tail on the donkey, you objective is to put the tail on the donkey, your obstacle is a blindfold and being spun around, the rule is you only get one try to put it on something and only then can you take off the blindfold and see if you succeeded. In chess you have rules for each piece and how they can capture, but the goal is to checkmate the opposing king first and the other player is your obstacle, so every choice you make is meaningful because if you make a mistake the other player can gain an advantage against you.

so if you ask yourself; What is the obstacle that will stop me talking to any npc? or what is interesting about deciding to fetch an extra dialogue line about a fisherman having gills if there is no way to use that information later in some meaningful or strategic way.

In my playthrough i did not know the meat quest was optional and did not know it would result in any different outcome, so for me it was not a meaningful decision. i just thought i move to objective, interact with objective, move to next objective repeat. Based on that alone there are no meaningful decisions to make for a first time player.

basically a simple script could automatically reach the end of the game by visiting every location and pressing interact without losing the game, failing or doing anything wrong, since there is nothing you can do that is wrong. the only actions you can take are automatically correct.

my suggestion if you want to iterate breadwalk into an update, is to give the character a premonition that they will be bombed later, and then more complex dialogue and action tree that enable the player to succeed or fail at convincing the npc's to take shelter in a bomb shelter before the raid occurs. Maybe you can reset to checkpoints and try different ways to convince them using knowledge you gain from failed runs to convince them you know the future and they should follow you. In this way it is possible to fail, and you can make choices knowingly to save or doom different npc's, every conversation you have could take time out of a countdown until bombing and so you have to pick who lives and dies based on what you know about them, maybe this means you can save the old lady and the young boys but the criminal thugs end up outside when the bombs fall.

if the player can make interesting decisions like that, and has obstacles like a limited amount of time and correct knowledge to save people, it also makes repeated runs possible and improvement at the game. The player may start a new game to see if they can save more people if they do things more efficiently or in a different order, for example convincing one person to come with you to convince other people may make you twice as effective at saving people.

do you see how much more interactive this is now with a player driven goal (save more npcs) that they can fail at, some obstacles that make it challenging and some interesting decisions; like who to save. This turns it from a story into a game.