I understand where you're coming from and I'll explain what I meant slightly better. Every game makes trade offs some trade readability (gameplay) for visuals, I just feel like you traded of gameplay for story and went slightly too far with stripping it off it, the suggestions I was making were just examples for making the gameplay less monotone and consequently more engaging without interfering with the story part of the game, cause if the gameplay is nothing else but a pause between portions of the story then, I feel like you could have just as well written a book instead of making a game.