Adventures are games too
But they usually have by far better guidance and no stupid "can only do this on tuesday evening" restrictions.
Problems with games like this one is, that they don't have a master plan when what will happen and then get produced in that way. They add a little bit of content so story arcs every now and then, which can be very confusing.
And of course it's also the players who tend to focus on one thing and ignore the rest instead of just going with the flow. Those who don't restrict themself have much fewer problems to proceed since they completed the necessary events already.
A ingame event tree would be cool to see what's missing to proceed on a certain path (like the one the Tex Murphy games have. They also give little hints storywise how to proceed, the player needs to explore. But they have a hint system that shows missing tasks).