Hopefully contructive critique.
1) It's pretty slow in the beginning, and I found myself wishing there was a skip button during the speech with the old man in the house.
2) The map needs labels. I can't figure what what goes where, never mind which one is the cave. Oh. Lol. The one thing that I thought for sure wouldn't be the cave turned out to be just that: a cave, rather than the prison building it looked like on the map.
3) Wow. What just happened. Okay, making the map so dark that the player can't read it during the nighttime hours, not so hot.
4) I like the lack of annoying mana points though. That's good.
5) there could be more of a plotline to the quests rather than just "oh look another monster, lets fight it.' There needs to be more of a point to fighting them. As it is it gets boring really fast.
All in all it has a lot of potential. A few things here and there that you need to clean up, and a few things that you could do with adding or fixing. I know this comment seems to do a lot of bashing, but it has a lot of potential. Give it more of a plot line (How will these quests that he finds posted in the center of town help him to get home, for example?) and it could be a good game. Also, maybe throw in the occasional puzzle instead of battle in the caves. You know, a sphinx type monster that you can only beat by solving the puzzle it presents you.
Hope all this was helpful. Good luck!