: Re: How much can I trust my players to remember previous states of the story and not get confused? In my game, the player may run into deadends in the story, which causes the game to end prematurely.

@Kristi637

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There are players for whom this structure, and the challenges it poses, might be the whole attraction of the game. If you want to cater to those kind of players, I think you just need to work to make it clear early on that this will be the structure of the game. You might do that by making sure the very first path the player chooses leads to a (very short) deadend, one that they can avoid with the information they learn on the deadend.

For instance, in order to get to any of the main part of the game, you have to pass a door with a password, but you only learn the password right before dying. That teaches the player to keep notes on things they learn because they might have to apply them to another pathway.

I have seen some branching structure games like this set up so that you can jump at will to any state you've already experienced (presented in a branching structure on a select page). That might make the game dramatically easier, however, which is good if you want it to be more of an interactive fiction experience, but not if you actually want people to play through certain parts of the game multiple times.

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