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.
. The maze could be composed not only of spatial twists but of moral and psychological choices.
A maze in a sense can include not just the physical navigation of a winding, twisting area, but also the traversal of societal and systematic confromtations.
But the most dramatically satisfying endings are the near-identical losing branches, which are the result of choosing to rescue either of the evil brothers.
At times, the opportunity to continue interacting with an environment can be more compelling that a simple ending.
The desire for agency in digital environments makes us impatient when our options are so limited.
Games often attempt to solve this problem by making obvious answers to problems that players are likely to discover yet believe that they conceived themselves.