Amnesia - problems with getting scared?

[Istrebitel]

"Always more than one way" is just a saying, it doesnt ALWAYS apply to life.

I think just one example will suffice. People in the top floors of skyscrappers 9/11 didnt have a chance. And you cannot argue that - it was just theoretically impossible for them to get out safely since they had no escape routes whatsoever (remembering that the whole thing went down as a controlled explosion means they didnt even have a chance for building to hold, since the fall was planned from the beginning).

You see then that after some point, there is no choice. When you stand in front of the hole - you have at least two choices - jump down or not. When you jump down the hole, you dont have a choice anymore - either you fall in something soft and survive, or you fall on something solid and sustain damage proportional to the height of the fall, your body composition, position in which you fall and type of the surface you fall on. You don't have a choice to live if there is a fall 20 meters down with poisoned spikes in the end.

Thats what i'm talking about in 2a) - you have no way to reach a point of no return, and this leads to your actions being irrelevant. It doesnt say there MUST be such point, but at least we should see nonsense or crappy choices making the life of the character harder in some way... At least change the story to the least favorable outcome? Or something?

And 2b) isnt contradictory at all - what i mean is that is always a way "forward" but its a single way! Its fine in quests where you have a goal to beat the game mechanics, in quest you think "how do i solve this puzzle". You know its a puzzle, you know its man-made up. In a 3d game that aims to immerse you in an alternate reality, in a body of some person, and let you act as this person, having the feeling of all this being man-made puzzle is NOT good. And when there is always a single way forward, you just naturally start feeling that way.

What i mean is exactly what you said - there is USUALLY more than one way out of situation. In computer games it is often ONE way and that's it. It's acceptable, as i said before, that you can have a point after which you dont have a choice anymore (and story might force you pass that point. But it is not normal for EVERY choice to be singular. For there to be single key for the door, single supply of items for the machine, single way out of the room, single way inside the room, single way out after a cave-in, etc etc. It is just too coincidental to be true. And it is too artificial to be true.

Therefore such "one choice" can only fit if we agree that the world the player is in is a special training course made for him. Like Portal test chambers. Or mario game levels. Or game's tutorial level. Or some soldier training course.

In a game which puts you into a frictional world based on real world, into a collapsing castle, chased by a reality-breaking nightmare, you would expect that you are just a man in a whole universe. I mean, we're not in some artificially created nightmare or dream - we are on planet Earth. There is Russia, America and Poland, there is Africa and Japan and all those people live their lives this very moment. It is just we cannot reach them because its irrelevant, since we're trapped in a castle with no means of long-distance communication. And we are set to follow the route to the inner sanctum of this said castle.

Now at no point of the story we are hinted or somehow told that the enemy (whoever it is, Alexander or the Shadow or...) actually wants us to come so it always leaves a way in. Meaning that everything that stands in our way is supposed to be truly coincidental. Like, the damn red thing grown too fast in front of us so we now need to dissolve it. Or a cave in blocked a path so we need another way around. This is okay.

However, it is naturally not a single way from one point of the castle to another, even if there is a set route of doors we must pass to get from point A to point B. You can climb walls, jump windows, get down holes. You can go trough doors, or bash them, or blast them or dissolve them or break them or lockpick them or destroy lock in any manner or find a key for them... This means our theoretical ways of progressing from entrance to inner sanctum form a very big graph, with interconnected together pretty much.

However, of course since player only needs to take one path from S to E, if we model every path that makes the player see very little content in one playthrough, and as i said, this game wasnt made for replayability. So, we narrow the path. We destroy graph connections. Its fine!
However, as you can see, they don't get destroyed by our will (they really do, obviously, by a map editor, but they dont in reality). So you should think about this destruction as a RANDOM event, UNGUIDED. Since it happens "by nature" or by force undirectionally applied. Therefore, we are bound to still have numerous paths left at least at SOME point of our journey.

Imagine this - we have five steps to take from start (S) to end (E), S-A-B-C-D-E
Now imagine normally there are three ways to go from one to another. This means we have 3 routes for a link from S to A, 3 routes from A to B etc.
This means on one playthrough, player will only see 1/3 of the content.
That's not good.
So we need to lessen those options.
We say "okay our castle is falling apart" or something. Now, normally, this would mean that we start removing the ways between parts randomly. This means, that naturally, the path would be totally broken (from one point to another there is no more ways to get) way before every path would turn down from 3 ways to 1 way.
For example, on the step before last (when there was 1 way in every link except one, which had 2), it was a 2/3 chance that we would break the path (by removing the last way from one of the links) and 1/3 chance to remove the way that made the system one-way in every link. Step before that we had (if we were lucky and we were at a state when 3 links are 1-way and 2 links are 2-way) a 3/7 chance to break the path and 4/7 not to break it, thats 3/7*1/3 - 1/7 chance already. And it only goes down. In fact, having a S1A1B1C1D1E situation will have an insanely low chance of occuring (cant give you exact formula right now, but can figure one out if you wish)

This means that naturally, we would encounter situation when there is more than one way from point A to point B. For example, fix the lift or remove safety measures and ride it down (it crashes eventually anyway). Or find the key or break the lock on the door. Or break the lock or go around hopping windows. Etc. Because it is VERY, VERY unlikey that the castle would end up in such state that there IS a path from S to E, but on every step, only one way to go remains.