in a solid design, a game with many evolving stages must guide the player through the recommended steps that will take him to achieve his game goals, but this is preferably conveyed in subtler ways. but it will be helpful, during game design, to have these phases/stages/steps - a happy path, alternate paths, concurring branches, optional branches, and so on - laid out, as they will provide a big picture for the mechanics, how each mechanic chains with each other, what's the complexity needed in each stage (earlier stages tend to be simpler than later, match-defining stages).
in a solid design, a game with many evolving stages must guide the player through the recommended steps that will take him to achieve his game goals, but this is preferably conveyed in subtler ways. but it will be helpful, during game design, to have these phases/stages/steps - a happy path, alternate paths, concurring branches, optional branches, and so on - laid out, as they will provide a big picture for the mechanics, how each mechanic chains with each other, what's the complexity needed in each stage (earlier stages tend to be simpler than later, match-defining stages).