u/Frost_Nova_1

I abandoned Amnesia The Bunker and didn't bother to finish it. Then I was reading the negative reviews and somebody pointed out how the game's non linear nature hindered the fun. Because the reviewer was expecting something more linear, where the game has already set up your path. Another reviewer commented on how the game tells you that you have to experiment and find your own solutions, just to be frustrated by how many of game game's objects serve no purpose and many of the so called "customized solutions" don't work. For ex: you can't expect a grenade to just blow up a wall and open a path for you go in because the physics in this game wasn't programed with that in mind.

More than one year ago I beaten Prey 2017 and I couldn't stop thinking on how hard to make this type of game is. Immersive simulators must be hard to design because you have to account for players finding glitches or unwanted paths.

Is there scientific research on that matter: is there a threshold on how much freedom or how many choices a game can have in which, beyond a certain point, it becomes mentally challenging and loses the fun factor? I do agree with the negative reviews of Amnesia The Bunker, because offering goals out of order and letting the player progress in any way they want seems to bring this drawback, in which many players expect the game to have already sorted out the goals so that they don't have to waste time taking decisions which won't change the ending after all.

I'm playing Crusader no Remorse which is a 30 year old game with manual saves. After a few days I came to notice some pattern about saving the game. Last year or the year before I played and beaten CoD MW remake. It's a game with checkpoints in just about every room. The whole game has checkpoints and they are close to each other, meaning that you can die and lose just a few minutes of gameplay. On the other hand, in Crusader, I'm constantly having to remind myself to save often. I often forget to save and this forces me to rollback a lot when I die.

So here is the question: is having checkpoints a matter of design choice, technology or even psychology, because the player is forced to remember to save manually?