My first recommendation for this game is to enjoy your first playthrough! Do everything the way you like, and only then try getting acievements and openning plot trees. Why? Doing that you will need to go through each chapter several times, and sometimes even go through the sequence of chapters from the beginning to the end. One happy playthrough won't influenсe on the speed of opening achievements/trees, but it can greatly delight you with the storyline.

1. Your main walkthrough, accessible by clicking the "Continue" button in the main menu, follows sequentially according to your plot.
2. The main walkthrough is (re-)recorded at save points when the blue circle appears in the upper right corner.
3. The walkthrough will not be saved in the Plot Tree (Flowchart) if the chapter has not been completed to the end, even despite saving within the chapter (Checkpoints).
4. Overwriting any chapter makes it and its predecessors the main walkthrough, accessible by clicking the "Continue" button in the main menu.
5. Rewriting earlier chapters does not affect later ones until all chapters before them are completed in the sequence.
6. After an incorrect action, you can immediately exit to the menu and click “Continue”, then the game will continue from the last save point, and the erroneous action will not be counted or saved.
7. After completing the chapter, the Plot Tree appears with the results of this chapter. By clicking "Continue", we move on to the next chapter. At this moment, you can exit to the main menu/out of the game - the results of the completed chapter are saved.
8. The results of the last chapter “Battle for Detroit” are saved after viewing all the credits. When the credits background changes to white, you can skip the rest by pressing the Escape key.

In the chapter “The Artist” (5) you can do one of these actions: read the book, play the piano or play chess. In the chapter “Night of the Soul” (31) you can only do the same thing you did in the 5th.
Thus in the “Night of the Soul” (31), Marcus is unable to read the book if he played chess before. However, the Plot Tree for 31th chapter has 3 actions to unlock. The player decides to replay Chapter 5 and leaf through the book.
After Chapter 5 is replayed, pressing the Continue button will make Chapter 6 available, and Chapter 31 will still be available through the Chapter list. Also, if you try to access chapter 6 through the chapter list, the game will continue with the book read, maintaining this fact at each subsequent save point when passing the previous one. If we try to complete Chapter 5 and then immediately 7 / 9 / 31, we will still get Marcus playing chess.

If you rewrite chapters inconsistently, you can get confused and forget which save point contains which backstory.

Let me give you an example. The situation:
1. Player has chapters 1-31 went through with the chess played;
2. He comes back to thebeginning of chapter 5 to read the book and continues through 6th and 7th Chapters;
3. He returns to the chapter 5 and play the piano, then goes till the end of this chapter.

The result:
The Chapter 6 save point will remember the piano (was overwritten after the third playthrough of Chapter 5);
Save points for the chapters 7 and 8 will remember reading (was overwritten while the second playthrough of chapters 5-7);
Save points for the chapters 9-31 will remember playing chess (was recorded while the first playthrough of chapters 1-31).
In this situation, starting sequentially from chapter 8, we will be able to read the book in chapter 31.

Accordingly, just in order to open all three types of leisure activities in the Plot Tree of Chapter 31, you will have to go through sequentially from Chapter 5 to Chapter 31 three times. Now you can imagine the difficulty of unlocking all the achievements and the plot trees.

Moreover, this knowledge helps to spend less time, saving the game wisely. Good luck!