To each their own. Personally I'm ok with freeroam but not with "sandbox" or too many minigames. I "play"(read) those games more like
novels than real games. The gameplay simply being able to choose what you want the MC to do, getting more engaged/immersed with the story.
Also it's hard to play with one hand
Yes, i have a similar approach; my preferred "gameplay" in VNs is to have a lot of meaningful choices, to be able to shape my own story in the frame a creator has set up for me.
So that means kinetic novels, which i dont consider to be games, are normally off the table completely for me, and those with fake choices like [continue/game over] or "Fuck this Girl?" [yes/no] are in essential kinetic also.
I can
read them if they are good enough, but i cant
play them.
The only advantage of free-roams over choice-driven ones is, that a Dev is able to present a scenery without distracting, view blocking decision bars, which is a major one, given
GIL3Ds talent to create those pictures.
The heavy, heavy downside of free-roams is the hunt for interactable pixels in the sceneries, which disrupts the flow of the story. In my opinion there is no real cure to this, because either one doesnt provide any visual help at all, which would be the most immersive, or outlines and/or highlights interactable objects in a certain way, which isnt gold either in terms of immersion.
I mentioned my anxiousness of missing something in free roams, which i would like to clarify: I am totally cool not to get to see all the available content, if it is based on my decisions, because that is exactly what meaningful choices are for, but i hate to miss content i could see in my current playthrough just because i failed to click on some pixels i overlooked. Which lead in my case to check in on the club owners gathering with Hana for like six times and multiple times with Warren and Jakob in the security room to be sure nothing has changed.
This is tedious and severely hampers the flow.
In my opinion there is next to nothing a free-roam can do, which cannot be achieved also by a well designed, branching and converging decision tree; and after you worked through that tree you have the peace of mind, that you did all what there was to do.