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I'm in Chapter 4. I realized you could let the police go on to your next destination ahead of you, but I didn't realize you can completely disregard their instructions and not even bother to get to the destination the same day.

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It's easy to forget that this game's actually sort of a Sims-lite horror game. I got so caught up trying to sleep through nice weather in order to complete rainy-day sidequests during Chapter 4 that the combat in Chapter 5 caught me completely off guard. That infinite-durability wrench you get for investigating two of the victim's friends has made the basic enemies a total breeze. The downside is that, having outclassed my guns and most melee weapons, I don't have (as much) reason to go fishing anymore. Well, I say that: I can still catch donuts and first aid kits that way. And fish, I guess.

I'm glad I finally started using a FAQ for the sidequests. My default approach to games is unnecessarily conservative; I would never use York's cigarettes to advance time because I didn't want to risk missing something. Now that I know exactly what's available and when, maybe I can stop wasting most of my playtime on driving around from one closed landmark to the next. Maybe I can actually make some forward progress.

I can't help laughing every time York smiles in this game. It's terrible and hilarious at once. It just looks so wrong, but also perfect.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

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To complete Emily's first two sidequests:

Get a piece of cheese and an onion from the milk barn during the day when it's not raining. On an evening when it is, get to Emily's house around 20:00 and she'll be there, trying to cook. Talk to her and then again to give her the cheese. Complete the chapter (I recommend replaying Chapter 2 for ease of completion). Do it all over again with the onion. I don't know anything about her third mission.

The gamefaqs guide explains exactly what you need to do, but the explanation is buried in the walkthrough for the individual chapter where you can first complete that mission.

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Cool map. It'd be better if it had trading cards and bones labeled, too; still wouldn't do me much good on this playthrough, but I might resort to it in the future. I think it's a testament to the quality of Greenvale's design that the town's layout is so easy to memorize, despite being kind of sprawling and circuitous around the edges.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

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It's no consolation for you now, but the 360 and PS3 have multiple accounts just to avoid problems like this.

(Well, it's another reason, anyway.)
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

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Sorry, no, this isn't the game you think it is. Think of this less as a murder mystery/police procedural and more as Majora's Mask minus the dungeons, masks, and fantasy setting: you can pursue the investigation and interview a lot of people, and actually make a lot of progress independent of the plot, but your interactions with NPCs don't have a lot of points of articulation, and you can't "solve" the case before the game is ready for you to solve the case. You can have your suspicions, but you'll have to wait for York to be ready to act on them.

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When I played through on Normal, I used five continues in the first two otherworlds of the game, and then basically never again as I figured out the game mechanics and got good at the QTEs. I'd recommend getting three different weapons ASAP: the infinite wrench, the infinite Wesley Special, and infinite Submachine Gun. You get these by completing Quint and Becky's sidequests, gathering all the bones and delivering them to Brian after Forrest's dog Willie has stolen them (which also earns you an infinite .357 magnum), and completing the first psychic map.

Shotgun guys are pretty easy no matter what you use on them as long as you keep running. Don't try to just sit there and take one out if there's more than one in the room; you should attack once or twice and then run around the side of the room to a new location. As long as you're moving, they have pretty terrible aim, and once they're charging their shot they typically don't reorient to target you. The Wesley Special's pretty tempting for dealing with groups since it stuns enemies effectively, but if you set any of the regular zombie-type enemies on fire, they typically charge over and do a small melee attack that's basically unavoidable. When I was doing the first two psychic spot maps, though, I had regenerating health* so it wasn't a problem.

Fighting a wall-crawler is similar to fighting a group of shotgun dudes: you need to hit once and run past her. I used the Wesley Special because rarely the fire would hit her at such an angle that she didn't dodge to another wall and died after a single long application.

The wrench is great for almost any other situation, though.

*Hey, so, occasionally I have regenerating health. I mainly noticed it when I was replaying earlier chapters or psychic spots, but at least once it happened in an area I was going through for the first time. Does anybody know what triggers this and why?

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Yeah, you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you let George and Emily hustle you along through the first few chapters without giving yourself permission to explore. At the very least, you should go to the Sheriff's Dept to eat lunch every chapter; it's a unique event each time. You should also investigate the NPCs who live in the same area as the Sheriff's Dept, the businesses closest to the Milk Barn, and places where you can pick up trading cards or other collectible items.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

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The lumber mill is the first major hurdle: other dungeons are taxing, but other than one exceptionally aggravating hallway, I don't find any of them as laborious as the lumber mill. This is when the game first really opens up, too.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.