I know there's some side stuff in this game you can miss and still beat the main game (blackmailing the sheriff), so I was wondering if I missed a ton of stuff because it seems like there's a bunch of locations/characters that are totally irrelevant and left unused.

Wasp lady: Never appears in the story. Nothing to do at her house.

Military base / Colonel: Never appears in the story. Nothing to do at location.

Hotel: Nothing to do at location. Proprietor hardly touched on.

Mortuary: Proprietor was severely underused. You grab a bottle of glue from him and that is the end of his contribution to the game. You can just kill him to grab the glue and bypass the puzzle.

TV station: Totally unnecessary. Cowboy autograph is useless. Killing Knight and taking the contents of the safe does nothing as far as I could tell.

Barber shop: Nothing to do there until the 3rd lodge prank, which was pretty disappointing. Every other prank required some elaborate puzzle and you'd think they would escalate in complexity as they went on. Nope, 3rd one is just "smash window, flip light switch".

School: Nothing to really do aside from visiting the bake sale to trigger the fire to advance the plot. Speaking of side content I might have missed, did anything come of the post master's arson spree? It was dropped after the TV fire as far as I could tell. You could blackmail the principal and teacher to get the baseball bat, which was pointless because you didn't need weapons until you got inside the lodge and your inventory would be wiped when you entered.

I know this game went through development hell back in the day. It was one of the biggest cases of vaporware in a pre-Duke Nukem Forever world. 3 years was unheard of for game development back then. I remember it made the cover story for the very first issue of PC Gamer back in May 1994. They were going to use CG models for the characters then caught the mid 90s FMV bug and delayed the game forever converting it. They would publish magazine ads saying, "Coming Summer 1994," then, "Coming Summer 1995," until they just gave up and went with "Coming Soon". By the time it finally came out in the fall of 1996, the hype had waned and FMV games were dying.

With all these unused locations and characters, I can't help but think they had to cut a lot of stuff to get the game out the door. The Harvest town part feels rushed and unfinished. They throw you in the "Mortal Kombat" lodge just when the town is getting interesting.

A fan interview made with the writer-director would suggest otherwise. The game is working as per his design, but for reasons unknown it took the programmers a very long time to finish implementing it. It was supposed to be an FMV game from the very beginning, it was the very reason they hired the writer-director. All the live action shots and much of the art was finished by 1994. Since the programmers told the writer-director early on that they were not even going to attempt coding a day and night cycle my guess is they were just not very experienced.

All these locations and characters that does not serve the plot DOES serve the lore and the setting. The game is more than just it's puzzles, it is a weird place to live and get to know.

You can balackmail the sheriff using safe's content. If you give sneekers (from evidence room) to Jimmy (the one who takes the papers) he'll tell you something about the principal. You can then take a photo of the principal enjoying his quality time and blackmail him :)

Also, you can kill jimmy the paper boy. However, it can be difficult, as he does pull out a gun. But if you do kill him, you now have access to a firearm early on.

True. But it's better to secure Out-Of-Jail pass befoere. Sometimes Sheriff decides it't not OK to do thjs kind of stuff in Harvest :)