When I checked the Freebird website years ago they explicitly said that a movie in game form is what they are doing. I liked the To The Moon story overall but I didn't like A Bird Story so I'm going to wait until Finding Paradise is very inexpensive before giving them a try again. I'm not a big fan of Jeff Vogel's writing either, although I'd agree that by doing something a bit different he manages to have a better story than most games (at least English language games, it seems like Japanese games often have much more emphasis on story, although certainly there are still plenty of Japanese games with bad stories). I don't consider the story being interactive to be necessary, although it can be used to good effect (even though usually the choices make little difference).
To Vogel's list of video game story banes I would add having the world behave in an unpredictable way as needed to perform a plot twist (in good writing, the reader and characters in the story are almost always aware of how the world works before it matters to the plot). I can overlook some of that at times (Falcom does that all the time, for example, but I think their stories are generally decent in other ways) but it still makes the story much worse. This is what I didn't like about A Bird Story and the description of this one makes me think this one isn't likely to be any better (however, A Bird Story was very focused and also lacked distraction from the aspects I didn't like).
I look at stories as having three basic aspects, world building (what is the world like independent of the characters or this particular story), interpersonal interactions (how characters interact independent of the plot), and plot. Some interactive games add an additional layer of explicitly or implicitly asking the player to reflect on various topics or situations (that happens anyway but doing it in a scripted way feels different to me). I find that my favorite game stories tend to focus heavily on interpersonal interactions, I think partly because few put in enough effort to make the world interesting and the plot tends to be determined by gameplay rather than by writing. Of course, many games that I don't like also focus on interpersonal interactions :/.
