The entire game is pixel hunting and releasing "gas" in the rooms to make people horny, there is no real choice as it is just you clicking on object/pixels to jump from one scene to the next. The game needs the kinetic tag. There is another game in this site which has similar scifish/cyberpunk themes "City of broken dreams" but compare the amount of divergent choices in this game to this which has basically none.
I would agree about gas mini-game being too sudden and completely lack any hints, you're right here.
Everything else... First you don't need pixel-hunting - main quest areas are highlighted and pixel-hunting is really for collectable items. You could safely ignore them if don't want, hardly it would affect
gameplay in any way. Several games have optional collectables & easter eggs - nobody force you to run for them.
Second - do you really played any kinetic games?
In AoG you would never have a time limit or limited amount of tries, it couldn't be called a kinetic game at all. Kinetic game is something like Haremon on F95 (and it was pretty @#$% at least initially).
Third - amount of player choices isn't a
gameplay (any Diablo is purely linear game - so it's lack gameplay, lol?
). Currently we are only at beginning of story so I don't understand what kind of "choices" you're expecting. Plus there is a linear H-games too and some of them are great.
I understand that you disliked linear story - but it isn't gameplay.
P.S. Well, and games with a lot of divergent choices rarely end well and usually have a few rushed endings
So it's double-edged sword.