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Linear

Linear games are likely the closest our medium can get to traditional, non-interactive media such as books or movies. The experience is pre-planned, carefully paced, and delivered in a fixed sequence, with little room for sweeping decisions or branching paths:

A simplified portrayal of the player journey in a linear game

The biggest and most obvious benefit of making your games linear is having the ultimate level of control over the combined storytelling and gameplay experience. If you know how to exert such control, you can grab your audience and take them through an experience they will never forget.

Nowadays, games with a fully linear gameplay and story are hard to find. Even the most restrictive ones often offer a few decision points, alternative solutions, optional paths, multiple endings, and at least a small degree of freedom in approaching the gameplay scenarios. A few examples of games I'd consider very linear (across the years, platforms, and genres) include Super Mario Brothers, Uncharted, Heavy Rain, Portal, and Inside.

If you're working on a linear game, you'll need to keep the highest standards of quality across the entirety of the game, possibly reworking whole sections of the game repeatedly. In linear games, pacing and balancing are much more controllable, but also even more important. Your players cannot ignore the parts they don't like, or easily distract themselves by doing side missions or exploring other parts of the game—if you fail to keep their interest (or get them stuck) you put them at great risk of leaving, permanently.