Yeah, I suspect it’s more about setting expectations: Turandot was second in the 2019 IFComp despite being completely linear, for instance. Maybe trickier to pull off in a mystery, though?
I’ve seen a couple people describing that kind of game as giving them the freedom to choose whatever they want, removing that tension between how they wanted to roleplay the character and how they wanted to interact with the mechanics. Which I thought was interesting. There are other ways of doing interactivity than trying to provide illusory agency…
There was that whole trend in mystery novels (around the time of Agatha Christie, I think?) where they were “supposed” to be puzzles that were fair, so when Poirot says he knows what’s going on, you have the choice to just read the story, or to challenge yourself to piece together the answer first and then see if you’re right. So that’s a kind of interactivity in a completely static medium…
Edit: huh. See also the discussion in the Xanthippe thread.