Ok, thanks for the clarification.
What you could do in theory. Is having floating names over areas in the scene allways or in context (look room?), and write things like, "go shuttle", then you could play a animation of the character walking over.
That is if you really want to have some animations and character movements and things connected to in scene positioning.
That should fullfill both criterias. You could combine that with the scene pausing during inputs to even allow "fast paced combat" where it just pauses at each possible action you can do. Could do interesting ways that way maybe