Now I don't think there's something wrong with the game forcefully making you play a certain way or punishing you for being bad.
After all, that's what all games do*. They make you play in certain ways, which is why you can't finish Call of Duty by constantly looking downwards, and punish you when you fail: you die, or you lose whatever amount of time, or you somehow end up with less of a thing that you had before you failed.
* - games that don't have lose states are excluded
If a game wants to be like this, fuckin let it. If most people aren't having a good time because of this, that's just bad game design and needs to be patched or something.
But then there's the part where the game lies to you about a mechanic. Normally we see game mechanics as not part of the actual game's lore/story/plot, and we expect them to be communicated and not lied about or obscured. Keep secrets if you must, but tell me how your video game plays. Seems like they did this to increase tension, but that's artificial at best. It crosses the 4th wall barrier in a way that you only stand to lose, and it's not even part of the story like it was in Nier: Automata.