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

Simply put, you cannot become better than someone else at a walking simulator, and this lack of a mechanism for dividing elite from noob might be what’s really behind some critiques complaining about the lack of gameplay.

The most dramatically satisfying puzzles are those that encourage the interactor to apply real-world thinking to the virtual world.

the answer to the riddle is not in a single word; it is in a series of beautifully orchestrated steps, an elegant algorithm for defeating giants.

In the novel the cruel things that happen to the hero are often treated as instances of a specific social injustice, like the English Poor Laws, rather than as the work of a generic antagonist like a big bad wolf.