Gone Home also plays with player agency by subverting expectations about danger and complicity.
The tension created by the bleak setting help better immerse the players into the story because they feel a sense of danger. It is interesting how the creators chose to implement a bleak setting and used the feeling it created to influence the player's reaction to the reveal.
In both pieces, the readers or viewers are given agency to understand and gain perspective on the story through their interpretive decisions: about which threads are most interesting to follow, and about how to piece together the events they witness into a meaningful whole.
I feel like the journal entries in the game are fluid and transition well between each other to not only be their own note but to build on pre-existing ones.
The player’s initial fear that they might need to act quickly to defend themselves from some lurking supernatural horror becomes transmuted, by the end of the story, into the inevitable realization that their character has already lost her chance to act,
It is interesting that the game plays on your previous experiences by creating an environment where it seems like some threat may pop up at any point, but subverts those expectations and instead deepens the atmosphere.