This is an intriguing idea to me, precisely because of its proximity to transcripts.
These days I (and those I play IF with) go to some lengths to record and circulate a transcript of any game we play, if at all possible. This is so that, years later, I can share a particularly good passage of text that’s stuck in my mind, or search all transcripts for “which was the game with the tremendous kielbasa”, or suchlike.
Without recording a transcript at the time, the only way to access text deep in a game is to spend the time to do all the puzzles again, which means I’d probably never see it again (and I often regret not having transcripts for the earlier games I’ve played, like Curses).
ClubFloyd transcripts are a precious resource to me for the same reason. (I sometimes wonder about a community-based transcript archive, but that would be a separate thread.)
Having a readthrough mode, and/or a common practice of there being machine-readable walkthrough-ish command lists to power it, would go some way to lessening my need to be on the ball about remembering to keep transcripts.
(I don’t know if there is already productised tooling to apply a bare walkthrough-style list of bare commands to a game to get a transcript? It’s clearly just a Small Matter Of Programming ™, but is it actually done in practice?)
even within slideshow mode, they can type as many autonomous commands as they like, to see what happens, and play around, with the caveat that (unless they explicitly exit the mode) the next time they enter an empty command line, the game state will back up to the last point they left off in the “slideshow”, and proceed with the next command from there
To be clear – does this reset all game state, so that if the player chucks the macguffin down the bottomless well during their unscheduled tour stop, it magically comes back before resuming the readthrough?
(Presumably quite system-dependent, if so!)