There's some good potential here! You communicate a lot of great worldbuilding in a short amount of time and the world you build is vivid and interesting.

I'm not really a strong enough writer myself to give feedback, but I think you could get by with cutting out a lot of the prose. Drop descriptions like "in a curt tone," "with a defeated look," "the scientist in front of us looked like this was nothing special" etc, as well as minor actions (like blocking and body language) unless it's a strong, motivated, dramatic choice.

For instance,

As we headed inside, I heard a strange noise. "Sir, did you hear that?" Zechria looked at me in confusion.

"The beeping, I think there's something around here..." I spoke cautiously, trying to keep my voice low. Zechria merely laughed in response. "What beeping? I don't hear anything."

"Cautiously" is implied by context and by "trying to keep my voice low." Zechria's reactions could be shortened or just left implied by dialogue ("merely laughed in response" doesn't do much more than "laughed" here). The strange noise could be a sound effect added over the dialogue rather than in prose, which would build the atmosphere, immerse the player, and allow you to cut out more text.

In this format especially, dialogue first, visuals second, foley third, and action fourth are your strongest and most accessible tools, so instead allow the dialogue to communicate how characters are looking and feeling and trust the player (as well as your own writing) to pick up what you're putting down. Use alternate sprites to communicate mood or body language (I assume this was constrained by the game jam timeline). Use sound effects to build the scene and atmosphere. Use occasional strong, motivated actions (not just minor blocking and body language descriptions) to move forward the dramatic question of a given scene.  It'll keep the pace up and reduce the amount of dry descriptions.

Take all of the above with a grain of salt, as it seems like you're intentionally going for a more prosaic style, but I think what makes visual novels shine as a medium is that they can use the multimedia tools of videogames to communicate the same story that prose would with much less text.

Overall well done; based on this I'm interested to know about this world and its conflicts.

Not my type of game, tho it is definitely neat. I like the player art on it's own, but in the context of the game and the stock images in the background, everything feels a bit out of place. For a first game, it could definitely be worse.