Solution: 🌳

The solver begins, presented with three notable UI elements on the screen - a set of three paths laid out before them, ten black dots, and ten clue pictures. The only interactable element is the three paths. Clicking on them advances the state of the puzzle, indicated by arrows representing which path the solver chooses to walk down.

Traveling down the path six times will lead to an endpoint displaying an interesting image, always following the format: A dark hedgehog, The thoughts of the dark hedgehog, another figure or figures overturned on the right. Cursory Googling of some of the elements of the endpoint images would reveal this is probably related to Sonic the Hedgehog somehow - a blue hedgehog and an egg, a reference to Sonic's primary antagonist Dr. Eggman, are both common fixtures in the endpoint image.

Solvers also should also observe the permanent fixture, the dark hedgehog, and be able to identify that this represents the character 'Shadow the Hedgehog'. Other things present in the images could confirm this suspicion: the ark, the aliens, and (to some extent) the crocodile friend are all fixtures of the 2005 Shadow the Hedgehog game. Solvers might notice that the map of the shadow the hedgehog game looks like it might be useful:

Source: https://sonic.fandom.com/

The six path choices you can make in each iteration of the puzzle correspond to choices available to you in Shadow the Hedgehog. Through exploring, testsolvers found that they could turn some of the ten black dots into green checkmarks by following specific paths. They should then investigate how they might choose which of the ten paths to take.

Searching for some of the elements of the clue images would lead you to find the “Shadow The Hedgehog library sequences”. Each of the 326 unique paths through the Shadow The Hedgehog game have official names, in-game example here:

Source: Shadow the Hedgehog - All 326 Paths! by PenguinTM on YouTube

A reference for these paths is available here:  https://info.sonicretro.org/List_of_Shadow_the_Hedgehog_Library_sequences

Solves can follow these paths to collect the ten checkmarks and complete the puzzle.

It was not intended for the paths to be ambiguous with respect to which choice they correspond to, but in practice almost no test solvers figured it out, so in case this comes up, the path surrounded in spooky trees and fog corresponds to the Dark path in Shadow the Hedgehog, the path with soft light and sunshine corresponds to the Heroic path, and the normal looking path is the Neutral path.

Authors' Notes

I had this premise my puzzleideas.txt for a long time, so I'm not 100% certain what the original inspiration was, but I'm relatively confident it came from having seen a tumblr post that said something along the lines of

If you're ever looking for an edgy My Chemical Romance mid-2000's emo title for your story, Shadow the Hedgehog has 326 possible routes and they all have canonical names like "Crystal of Tragic Knowledge" and "Reborn Along with Sorrow".

One of the things I like doing is forcing solvers to come upon some lightly cursed knowledge, and this year you got to find out that someone on the Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) team sat down and wrote unique, incredibly of-the-time titles for each of the 326 possible sequences of choices you can make! In the cartoon hedgehog game!

Earlier Versions

In the original formulation of this puzzle I wanted you to have to figure out this was Shadow the Hedgehog and then seek out how you "beat" Shadow the Hedgehog. The way you get the true ending of Shadow the Hedgehog is to get each of the ten distinct endings, then play through the game one more time to achieve the true ending.

I tried to simulate that by first letting you explore with no prompt, then revealing four route prompts as the "true" ending once you had achieved all ten endings. In practice, solvers sought out all ten endings regardless of whether they knew about the subject of the puzzle, so when the prompts got revealed it felt like it was for no reason, so I scrapped the first phase and extended the prompt phase so it required all ten endings.