Well a lot of games on this site fall into this trope. Its a bad way to implement a choice driven narrative. Lets look at KOTOR for example for how to do illusion of choice correctly. KOTOR is one of the best RPG games of all time. One side quest at the start of the game you gain access to a serum that you can give away to charity so all can be cured for low cost. Or you can sell it to the exchange so only the rich can afford it for big finders fee for yourself.
Either way you go about it, the only difference in reality between these two choices is a few lines dialogue. Thats it. Its an illusion of choice. The gameplay is exactly the same with either choice carrying you down the same path. But the dialogue and the context of the narrative is now different.
For example you can do the light side route and at the end of the game turn darkside. The narrative context would be that bastilla ended up convincing you in the end to betray your ideals because of your history with the jedi. The revelation of being revan took its toll on you, even though you were a good guy. Or you could go darkside the whole way and take the lightside route. The context of this playthrough would be you are doing it because of manipulative and selfish reasons not necessarily for the hero reward. Maybe you have a deeper ploy at play that you will go for after the games over. But do realize Malak needs to go and the starforge is bad news and not worth the risk for quick galatic domination.
But you see how the context of the narrative changes because its an illusion. A lot of content creators on here think illusion of choice needs to be implemented as a game over screen. Thats the worst way to do it and it accomplishes nothing unless you get the correct choice on your first try, only to feel lied to thinking that there is actual depth in the game with the other choices.
There is no sense of accomplishment or sense of danger when you can scroll your mouse wheel backwards and select the other choice when you get a game over screen. This is just a needless trial and error in the most primitive way possible to give you the illusion of you having a choice in the narrative. When its doing the opposite, making you feel like you do not have a choice in the narrative.
A strong point for this game is how it creates unique personalities and characters, and does stay within that characters personality matrix. But you dont need a big budget to do illusion of choice correctly. The writer has no idea how to pilot a choice driven narrative and obviously did not do surface level research into the topic of how to create a choice driven narrative. In his defense most games on here fall into the same problem. Its one of those things thats easy to do if you do basic research on the topic, but you are not going to figure it out on your own without doing the research, end up implementing bad tropes that degrade your game.
