i played the original stanley parable and some of ultra deluxe but i always forget what i’ve done. i wish there was a way to keep track. it’s discouraging to be going down a path and then realize oh i already did this and i remember everything after this.

@SweetAmelia interesting, i play games like they're marathons so i tend not to notice the need for that

my instinct was also "but wouldn't that system imply to the player that they should get everything?" i.e. forcing completionist mentalities onto those that only want to go through a game as it's meant to be experienced

i guess you can also solve that by just not showing paths not taken, or obscuring some other elements of branching paths. summaries would also probably help

@vivianrose well, if you haven’t played the stanley parable specifically, the whole game is about taking different paths. each path doesnt usually last long and theres gameplay choices you can make at various points to quickly go onto a new, different path from whereever you’re at. if you only played one path of the game you would be getting pretty much nothing out of it lol, it’s designed for you to fuck around and see what happens.

@SweetAmelia oh i'm aware! and i think it does a great job at encouraging the player to just keep going to fuck around

still, when i played it (and i did the same for the dlc) i chose every single thing i could think of and mashed every button all in one go, so i tend to keep a mental map of everything easily like that. games should keep in mind that people have shit to do though, and offer different ways to remind them of things, but it's not something i remember to appreciate when it exists

@vivianrose that’s fair. i rarely binge things tbh and its a big pain point for me to have to like replay or rewatch things. it makes it a lot harder to go through things and often i just end up waiting even longer than i usually would until ive forgot enough that i can replay bits ive already played without being frustrated, or i never touch it again.

@SweetAmelia
this is tangential, but i know of a game that imo handles this very well

in ai: the somnium files, a murder mystery visual novel (ish, it's way more interactive), loading into a save file will display images of important scenes leading up to your save point. in the sequel they also added relevant voice lines to the loading screen. by the time the game boots up, you're already back in the action and i wish more titles had some form of that

@vivianrose i’m planning to play that soon! that’s neat, tho tbh i’m not sure if that would be enough for me. i’m not sure what the best method for this is. i wish i could like be thrown into a like 15x version of the game so i can be caught up but still be experiencing lol.

@SweetAmelia ooo have fun playing when u get to it!

luckily a lot of VNs have options to both check the flowchart, seeing what choices you made as well as the different story segments you went through, as well as fast forwarding through read text in case you jumped to an older story segment

@vivianrose i do barely ever play VNs though >.> really a problem in any game with a story