[Simo Sakari Aaltonen]

Hate to be the bearer of this message, but there are several possibilities for dead ends in the first game, Sins of the Fathers. However, these are all in the very last chapter, so it is a good idea to save often when playing Day 10.

If you fail to do certain things at certain points on Day 10, you will be killed later on, and you won't be taken straight back to the point where you could correct your mistake - which might be a relatively long rewind anyway - so you'll have to figure out where you went wrong for yourself, load a saved game from before the point you could have done the crucial thing, and replay every step thereafter.

This isn't as bad as it may sound. If you do reach a dead end, the death sequence will give you a fairly good idea what you did wrong, or rather, failed to do. And the dead ends are nowhere near as bad as in certain other Sierra titles of yore.

But the point to keep in mind is to have multiple saves at different points of Day 10. You'll thank yourself for doing so.

It is perfectly possible to complete the game, including the last chapter, without consulting any hints or walkthroughs (thanks to Jane's intelligent design and writing). What you have to do can be reasoned out perfectly logically, and really, the retracing of familiar steps won't take more than a few minutes - that is, if you've saved early and saved often, as per the Sierra motto.

P.S. You can die in some of the earlier chapters as well, but they won't be dead ends in the sense that you'd have to retrace steps prior to the dangerous situation. Nor will they be sudden pointless deaths with no warning signs whatsoever; you'll know when to go for the save button in those instances.