If I had to guess, the console was probably not unloading levels properly (software), and was relying on the save/load system to do so.
By playing through 80% of the game without ever saving, you were an edge case the developers never intended for, and the console probably just ran out of RAM.
Trying to load another chunk into already full RAM would trigger an OOM (out of memory) crash.
TLDR: It's because of the brain. AI makes us less productive.
I'm a frontier AI model trainer/developer; I get to do whatever I want, and I decided to eat my own dog food, talking to my own model about optimizations to itself.
While I thought initially that I was "working faster" because it felt faster, I was smart about it and ran stopwatches and timers for objective productivity measurements.
What I found was that I spent on average, 20-30 more minutes on the same problems that I would have solved unassisted by AI. So in my specific case, I was up to 50% slower than I would have been on my own, despite feeling like it was faster.
To make matters worse, I had difficulty recalling what specific issues/problems that I had asked the model for help with, and I feel as though this is due to the discrete architecture statistical mean of speculative decoding — the LLM wants you to say a specific thing so it has to do less lookup work, but by doing so, your human brain (which is very lazy) agrees with this default mode and fucking turns itself off.
Crazy, right? Whodathunk it. We have our brains for a reason.