Though Ayuto begins the game without having sinned, he is not "sinless" by this game's definition because through you he has the capacity to do so, if you're callous enough to let his fellow tourists get whacked. And considering that this is a horror game, isn't that part of the draw for most players? Serise claims as much if you let the first character, a nine-year-old girl, die, after which Ayuto wonders why her death gives him such an adrenaline rush. We are judged just as the characters are by our bloodthirsty appetites, and depending on the extent to which we indulge them, the final scene of the game, visually identical between the good and the bad endings, takes on two vastly different tones. It's an elegant and unfussy take on how the player's actions within the diegesis of a game unavoidably corrupt the narrative elements; as such, this game seems like a pretty influential expression of the "game space as underworld/point of no return" concept that hits like Siren and Persona 3+ would go on to mine (and while we're at the comparisons, you can bet that Kotaro Uchikoshi stirred a handful of this into 999).

The RPG stuff is strictly rudimentary, but the game's mechanics are secondary to its genre's function as an expressive tool for tremendous visual imagination. Can't think of the last RPG encounter I've been through that hit as hard as Ayuto's underwater scuffle with the mummy.