I found the AI had some trouble navigating the interior of the house. I had to use half-tile collisions due to how the art is drawn, which is less than ideal, and still (after ~3 years of knowing my engine has this problem) can't navigate around them correctly. We'll do more with the npc a little later. So instead for today's update I did something a little more frivolous:

I quickly hacked up some intro text that fades in. I can have different intro text pop up for each scene, and I could trigger similar text from an event whenever necessary. I like it because it doesn't stop you from messing about if you just want to get going (a golden rule of Erik is to remove control from the player as little as possible). I'm sure the aesthetics could be improved. Version 2.