Have you ever had a parser game idea that was too linear?

[JoshGrams]

Uh. That’s not universally true. I had completely the opposite experience with Anchorhead, and Dan’s post that you linked comes to the opposite conclusion as well, making the argument that Anchorhead’s linear plot and progression DOES significantly undermine the feeling of freedom:

@dfabulich

This mismatch is a bad thing, IMO, because it means that the vast majority of Anchorhead’s map is irrelevant to the problem you’re solving right now.

[…]

All of the puzzles look solvable, but only one or two of them are; there’s no fair way to know which ones are which, and that makes the game frustrating, even when you find out the right answer.

The moral I draw from this is that games with big maps should have wide, branchy puzzle dependency charts, or else should have a clear in-game guide telling you “you can solve puzzle X now. It may seem hard, but trust me, if you think about it, you’ll get it.”