Funny you should mention this, I just finished Trails from Zero, which tries to avoid this.

Basically, if you pass a certain point in the story, you are locked out from the open world due to story reasons, only being able to travel to places mandated by the story. However, before you pass this point, the main character comments something along the lines of “We should get everything in order before we proceed”.

And if that wasn’t enough, just before you enter the area that’s past the point of no return, the game straight up tells you “OPENING THIS DOOR WILL ADVANCE THE STORY PAST THE POINT OF NO RETURN”. Immersion breaking, sure, but I appreciated it none the less.

You can nearly always get the bonus by going left instead of right when presented with a choice. Game designers almost always put the game progression to the right.

Harder to say if you should choose up or down when it is not a left or right choice, but I usually go with up because it is usually possible to find another way down because of the game’s gravity.

I wish this would happen far, far more often than it does. I would make games far more interesting to replay. It would also apply some level nominal amount of meaning to acquire ‘item’ instead of it just being a factor of ‘x’ amount of time of grinding.

Just replace ”item” with ”meaningfull interaction”