Well, for starters, the objective should ALWAYS be defined in a game - you're playing it, so you have to know what you're supposed to be doing. Best of all is when the game has a button that displays your current objective (even if it's rather vague like "Get on the next boat out of Rubacava"). Gray Matter did just that, and I find that to be a plus. That way you'll definitely remember where you were in the game and what you had to do, even if you hadn't played it in a while.
I think the objective should be defined in such a way that you at least know in which direction you should be going. "Board the next boat out of town" is good enough, even if you can access 10 different locations in the city. You'll instinctively go to the harbour in that case.
The objective should then get refined as you discover things for yourself. If for instance you go to the harbour but the harbour master informs you no boats are coming in because the lighthouse is broken (or whatever), and he can't leave his post to fix it, then the objective should change to "fix the lighthouse so you can board the next boat".
It's pointing you in the right direction (in this case the lighthouse), but it's not plainly giving you the solution you need (because there will still be things to do in the lighthouse that haven't been defined yet).
I'm mainly trying to say that option B is far superior, but that the game should at least give some general pointers so you're not wandering the game world without a clue of what needs to be done in order to progress...
If you're stuck in a game, you should at least be able to specify what puzzle you're stuck on, rather than being stuck on the general story.
I don't know, am I even making sense here?
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