I just finished Simon's part of the split path and feel compelled to vent.
That whole segment was one of the worst cases of bad game design I've ever seen. An unspecified time limit, with open ended tasks that take arbitrary amounts of time to complete, that change based on hidden variables from previous chapters. And absolutely no information provided to the player throughout.
How did someone implement something this bad? How did they not get to step XX/1000 and think, "hey does this make any sense?"
I'm glad some of you heroes have followed the walkthrough step-by-step since pressing "new game" and have shared saves, or this would be going straight into the bin. But I want to ask, does this continue? Do future chapters get any better about presenting information to the player, or is the rest of the game more blindly following the walkthrough?