Kind of a fundamental weirdness with the genre in its most vanilla form is how much they're allegedly exploration based but so much of that is guided by powerup trees. So it's like a linear tour, posing as exploration, to some extent

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There's almost never really trees, just powerups, and they tend to be pretty non-linear actually, more than almost any other genre overall.

You do want to design some gating to help guide players.

But without that, where else does the actual gameplay from "exploration" come from?

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