There's branching paths! Several clues are right for each step; we warn about the ones that you're most likely to miss, but you can beat the game without ever picking up all the clues.
But you can't beat the game with just the knife, the journal, and the play--if you have only those three items, it won't warn you that you need more evidence, but you get stuck at the "what happened after the mutiny started" stage and none of those three items will get you past there. That's a softlock state.