I have a lot of strong feelings on player (dis)empowerment in videogames. Broadly speaking, I think videogames should default towards aiming to make players feel empowered, and should only imbue feelings of disempowerment and weakness very intentionally and that unintentionally doing so is largely a failing.
Journey very consciously plays around with player (dis)empowerment a lot to great effect. The first time you get to jump and float through the air was really exciting, and the hidden trinkets being extensions for your scarf (that fuels how long you can float through the air for) makes exploring to find them feel very rewarding. The underground sections feel all the more imposing and stifling precisely because it's so hard to find places to recharge your scarf, and encountering the water for the first time was maybe my favourite moment in the game because it contrasted so heavily with the underground (and with most underwater sections in most games); your scarf is fully charged underwater, and you move similarly to how you do when jumping above actual ground, which makes swimming feel closer to flying (generally an inherently empowering game mechanic). The following sections after this push both disempowerment and empowerment to their greatest extremes, and the game is very effective at channelling all of this and the contrast felt here into strong emotional responses from the player.
A bit of me wishes they went even further than this. I found the exact mechanics of how jumping worked pretty frustrating for the first half hour or so, where you had to go near specific points to recharge your scarf in order that it could be ready for when you need it later. This is partially because it felt pretty disempowering over all, I was so often looking at my jumping through the lens of not always being able to do it rather than through the lens of how good it felt to actually perform. It's also awkward because the exact way this is constructed implicitly prompts players to play in ways that aren't fun; you feel this need to preserve your scarf in case there isn't an upcoming charge point near a secret you may need to jump to soon rather than enjoying jumping and floating/flying across the desert. I think I'd have liked to see the scarf recharge whenever you're not actively using it and are under the direct desert sunlight partially because it solves these problems, but also because it emphasises everything that comes after; it would make the underground parts that immediately follow these desert sections feel even more oppressive by contrast when all of a sudden you don't have the harsh sunlight helping you dance across the terrain.
The game is just generally good at provoking emotional responses even beyond how it empowers and disempowers the player. When the ancient beast lurched up for the first time underground it shocked and terrified me, making me feel so weak and small underneath it and these beasts never really stopped feeling so imposing and threatening. The sense of history in the world adds to the game's ability to draw you in, especially in the underground sections, though the presentation of the story and background for all this was a bit too oblique for me to really follow it at all or get much from it sadly.
Journey very consciously plays around with player (dis)empowerment a lot to great effect. The first time you get to jump and float through the air was really exciting, and the hidden trinkets being extensions for your scarf (that fuels how long you can float through the air for) makes exploring to find them feel very rewarding. The underground sections feel all the more imposing and stifling precisely because it's so hard to find places to recharge your scarf, and encountering the water for the first time was maybe my favourite moment in the game because it contrasted so heavily with the underground (and with most underwater sections in most games); your scarf is fully charged underwater, and you move similarly to how you do when jumping above actual ground, which makes swimming feel closer to flying (generally an inherently empowering game mechanic). The following sections after this push both disempowerment and empowerment to their greatest extremes, and the game is very effective at channelling all of this and the contrast felt here into strong emotional responses from the player.
A bit of me wishes they went even further than this. I found the exact mechanics of how jumping worked pretty frustrating for the first half hour or so, where you had to go near specific points to recharge your scarf in order that it could be ready for when you need it later. This is partially because it felt pretty disempowering over all, I was so often looking at my jumping through the lens of not always being able to do it rather than through the lens of how good it felt to actually perform. It's also awkward because the exact way this is constructed implicitly prompts players to play in ways that aren't fun; you feel this need to preserve your scarf in case there isn't an upcoming charge point near a secret you may need to jump to soon rather than enjoying jumping and floating/flying across the desert. I think I'd have liked to see the scarf recharge whenever you're not actively using it and are under the direct desert sunlight partially because it solves these problems, but also because it emphasises everything that comes after; it would make the underground parts that immediately follow these desert sections feel even more oppressive by contrast when all of a sudden you don't have the harsh sunlight helping you dance across the terrain.
The game is just generally good at provoking emotional responses even beyond how it empowers and disempowers the player. When the ancient beast lurched up for the first time underground it shocked and terrified me, making me feel so weak and small underneath it and these beasts never really stopped feeling so imposing and threatening. The sense of history in the world adds to the game's ability to draw you in, especially in the underground sections, though the presentation of the story and background for all this was a bit too oblique for me to really follow it at all or get much from it sadly.