Well, the thing here is that there are only so many options for what you can write and trying to convey the right thing can be tricky. I haven't put a lot of time into Dark Souls yet but for examples:
there is a moment fairly early on when you come out of a tower onto a battlement, and as you walk accross it a giant demon appears that can be fairly difficult to take on at that point in the game with straight combat.
The way the developers intending you to do this is that there is a ladder that takes you up to the battlement on top of the tower you came out of (where there are some skeleton archers); you need to clear that off, get the demon to attack, sprint to the ladder and then do a diving attack from the top of the tower.... it's a puzzle for most players, a few might be able to just beat the demon down if their reflexs are good or if they managed to scavenge gear and levels from elsewhere first of course.
At any rate, there is no real way to convey what your supposed to do in detail there, so a "ladder ahead" message is an indication that there is a ladder that plays a crucial role in whatever your supposed to be doing.
If I ran into the situation from this comic strip, including the dead end/ladder, my immediate thought would be that I'm supposed to get to the ladder quickly and then dive-attack the monster to give me an edge on it.
Also since multiple messages can show up and this game allows for a lot of freedom, sometimes it CAN be confusing when you see more than one solution presented. For example in a later area there is this armored boar-demon thing, and a good way to kill it is to get it to chase you and hide in a location where it can't reach you and use ranged weapons (unlike MMOs nothing prevents you from doing this). Another solution is to play "dodge the baddie" and run it into a convienently placed bonfire. You walk into that area you can find a bunch of differant messages leading you towards differant things. Run it down the hall, snipe from the stairs left of it (or throw firebombs), use the bonfire... all viable solutions.
Half the fun of Dark Souls/Demons Souls is putting the messages into context, the communication between players was limited intentionally.
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