This is (partly) why the ending didn't work (in my opinion) [long; spoilers, obviously]
To be clear, the fact that the ending is depressing is not the problem (though for what it's worth I don't think a happier ending, or at least a less one-dimensionally miserable one, would have somehow undermined the overall experience). There are, in fact, multiple problems with the ending, but here's one of the bigger ones.
The point of the ending appears to be that the tragic events depicted were — for whatever open-to-interpretation, in-universe reason — inevitable, and that Thomasina's unaccountable and contradictory behaviour (and the immutability of the ending, despite the player agency offered by the game's choice mechanics) is evidence of this inevitability.
Setting aside the various problems with the *execution* of this idea, I feel there is a fundamental issue with the concept itself; one that makes it rather difficult to construct a satisfying narrative arc upon said concept, especially within the gaming medium.
As an audience, we know and expect that certain events in a story are inevitable; not due to the machinations of some in-universe force, but simply in order to form a basic narrative structure and to construct the circumstances necessary for the story to proceed. When Tom Hanks boards a plane in Cast Away, we know that it will crash, but that's not because a cult of shadowy conspirators has sabotaged his plane. We know it will crash because the film is called Cast Away, and because we know that it's about Tom Hanks being stranded on a desert island, and that one way or another he is going to have to get to that island in order for the story to take place. When he later sees a ship in the distance and tries to escape to it on a life raft, we know that he will fail, but that's not because he has incurred the wrath of an angry sea god. We know he will fail because there's still an hour and twenty minutes of the film left.
Similarly, we expect a certain amount of irrationality and unrealistic, inconsistent behaviour from our characters — in any storytelling medium, but *especially* when playing a video game. In a video game, not only do the characters' actions have to support and progress the narrative arc as they would in other media, but they must also be in service of the *gameplay*. We see this kind of "video game logic" all the time — protagonists searching for keys to doors they could easily get through by force; friendly characters blocking progress to demand fetch quests; heroes ducking out of the apocalypse to sing karaoke — and point'n'click adventure games have always been especially notorious for this: anybody remember the inflatable duck puzzle from The Longest Journey?!
These elements of inevitability and irrationality are pretty universal — to the point of becoming cliches, in many cases — but unless you're trying to construct a Cabin-in-the-Woods-style meta-narrative, they are not employed for the sake of their own creative or artistic value. Rather, they are simply the necessary contrivances required to tell a conventionally-structured narrative, and to do so in the form of a video game.
Are you starting to see the issue? This inevitability and irrationality is the assumed *starting* point of the narrative; they are the concessions to the genre and medium of storytelling that the player makes *by default* upon starting this (or really any) game, and these phenomena are assumed to be *outside* of the story that the game is trying to tell.
So when Mildred warns Thomasina to return to London when we first meet her at Bewlay station, we know very well that Thomasina will ignore her — not because of her stubborn, rationalist personality, but because it would be a very short game if she didn't. When she continues to ignore similar warnings throughout the course of the game, and fails to act upon the myriad and undeniable red flags that gradually accumulate around her, we don't see this as evidence of her dogmatic worldview blinding her to the peril of her situation (or whatever) any more than we question her ability to fit an entire violin in her trousers; or her unaddressed habit of going around describing strangers out loud, unflatteringly and to their face.
We take these things not as crucial details of the story being told, but as parts of the mechanism being used to tell it. We recognise the necessity of such contrivances, and trust the developers to overcome the potentially immersion-breaking artificiality they impose and use that mechanism to present a satisfying, believable, cohesive, original narrative arc;— a trust that, for the majority of the game, the developers live up to spectacularly.
When Thomasina strides confidently into the barrow after days of threats, incidents and bad vibes — mere moments after the specific details of the conspiracy and the identities of those behind it have been explicitly laid out — we are forced to rely on this trust. Why is she doing this? She is intelligent, demonstrably so, and regardless of her views on the supernatural, her encounter with Mr. Ambrose will have made it plain to her that she is at clear risk from *earthly* forces if nothing else.
Because we trust the developers, based on the strength of the storytelling thus far, we assume that this incongruity will somehow be satisfactorily resolved, which primes us to expect some kind of subversion. Thomasina must have a trick up her sleeve. Or, at the very least, she must *think* she has a trick up her sleeve. The sequences that follow — full of clever, resourceful puzzle-solving by Thomasina, punctuated with dark and portentous visions, thick with apparent symbolism, and ooh, what's all this about a tablet? — seem to support this expectation, and give the impression that all of these strange and disparate threads are about to be pulled together into a satisfying and well-thought-out conclusion.
So when Thomasina bursts into the temple of Abraxas, goes "YUP THAT'S A TABLET" and then unhesitatingly does precisely what we were told the cultists were intending for her to do, not only are we left wondering exactly how and when our savvy, capable heroine turned into Willie Scott from The Temple of Doom, or a second-act victim in a cheap slasher movie, but any implications about the inevitability of this outcome, or what might have led Thomasina to behave so illogically, arrive as a total anticlimax. Yeah, we know it doesn't make sense for her to have put herself in this situation. We knew that from the beginning, and have spent the whole game handwaving it away as a horror cliché; a necessary evil required to facilitate the actual story. Now, at the climax of this incredible journey, we discover that this horror cliché, in fact, *was* the story — and it's just such a shame. The parade of off-camera cosmic horrors, exploding nurses, evil laughter and patricide that leads us into the credits really only adds insult to injury.
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It's Lovecraftian, yeah, but by way of M.R. James. Classic Edwardian horror (again, filtered through early Lovecraft) in a vein that doesn't often filter through to games.
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