Amnesia - problems with getting scared?

[hollowleviathan]

I think your argument that there's always a key available on the right side of each door is actually well-addressed by Amnesia. There are locked doors, but you advance past them, if I recall correctly, using acid, a crowbar, a remote explosion, and an actual key only once. You don't find most keys, because they're with the jailer or some other inaccessible location that makes more sense lore-wise than conveniently in a location where you can find them.

Also, the problem with making a wide-open world is that it mostly just derails the advancement of the story. You have to have some way of gating gameplay progress to bottleneck into important plot moments, otherwise you're making 1. a sandbox game with isolated nondependent quest hub, 2. a massive undertaking, WRPG like Fallout that is good for letting players make their own stories, or 3. a huge empty confusing map that adds nothing to either gameplay or story for the sake of some small immersion/suspension of disbelief, and at worst feels grindy and samey with excessive enemy encounters.

There's nothing inherently wrong with 1. and 2, but those are simply just not gametypes that fitted the Amnesia story.