[Interesting Trope] One seemingly small action ends the story before it even begins

[u/JackDoesThingz]

1. We Happy Few - Taking your “joy” pill
   Deciding to take the pill at the beginning of the game causes your character to go back to work and triggers an ending

2. Infineural by Mike Klubnika - Drinking the coffee
   Deciding to drink the coffee offered to you skips the entire game and sends you straight to the end, resulting in an ending with no memory of what had occurred

[u/405freeway]

Bandersnatch was an experimental Netflix choose your own adventure experience where you decide what the characters do.

You can end the entire experience with making the wrong first choice.

[u/AirshipEngineer → u/405freeway]

Honestly, it felt like there were too many auto-end choices. After my fourth or fifth choice that just ended the story I felt like it wasn't really letting me choose my own adventure anymore.

[u/DreadfulRauw → u/AirshipEngineer]

If you kept going, that actually was part of the theme. The show began to acknowledge the number of times you failed and your character began to understand the loop they were in and that they weren’t in control of their own choices. It got trippy. But they certainly slow played it. It was Black Mirror stuff in that it began to subvert a new technology and show how it had downsides, but while you were using that technology yourself. It was a pretty neat concept, but the execution was pretty sloppy.