games

I agree entirely. I've always loved games where you can skip parts of the path, or choose your own path, or accidentally make things difficult for yourself trying to scale a wall and make some ill-advised jump because you didn't realize that the designers put a convenient door somewhere. That would mess with their dumb forced cutscenes and triggered story events, though, so I'm not holding out hope that we'll see AAA games designed that way. Big game studios seem to be married to the idea that they're making movies with interactive fight scenes instead of games. If they want to go back to systems-driven movement I'm all for it, but given that so many of the environments in these games are just very elaborate unidirectional hallways, the least they can do is visually indicate which part of the environment gets me further down the hallway.