I just finished this excellent game, and boy do I have thoughts about the ending.

First of all, I've seen people mention a jarring whiplash at the end, and they are correct.

There *is* whiplash when going from the last bossfight to the last section of the game. Thematically the game is one step in dark fantasy and one step in eldritch horror. We do get a lot of the Lovecraft mythos right from the start, but the theme of "you are insignificant, you can't do jack to affect the larger events" isn't present until that very last stretch. You go from trouncing the last boss to "alright, back on the railroad tracks, boss revives, everybody dies, nothing to be done" quickly enough to be jarring.

If anything, the Queen would have been a better final boss. As in, if you go to fight it you die in a cutscene without a bossfight. Go reload your save. You have officially entered the realm where human might can't do jack. You can use ingenuity to still overcome those impossible odds, but this leaves your party at 1hp, wounded and unable to fight further. All of that actually does happen in the game. And it leads a lot more cleanly into the ending. Instead of the tiny men in the walls stripping you (and mostly only you, the women get to keep their clothes, those little horrors are gentlemen, how dare you) your backpack could be lost in the cave-in, and with 1hp, no attunement, no items and no camping point, you wouldn't be able to heal. Now Roland's wounded state and his ultimate sacrifice would flow naturally, instead of him going from unwounded at full hp at the end of the bossfight to dying in the span of a single cutscene, and your party's inability to fight back from this point on to the end of the game would also flow a lot more naturally.

Also, if you strip agency from the player step by step first by taking their items, then their ability on to use the RPG mechanics that served them well up to that point, and then have them go on solving puzzles, and at the end of the final dungeon the final puzzle is an answer predetermined from the start and there is nothing to do about it, it flows a lot better than going from full agency to no agency in one cutscene. Especially since it's right after the "triumph" of player agency, the defeat of the final boss.

Now, all of that aside, it is my personal opinion that full lovercraftian stories don't translate well into video games. As a medium, video games work around the player's agency, and players hate nothing more than having the blindfold pulled from their eyes and realize that nothing they did ever mattered, that their choices had no impact and were eventually meaningless. Video games lend themselves a lot more naturally to "Lovecraft-lite", where the elements of the Lovecraft mythos are present, and you certainly won't beat an Ancient by punching it, but there is agency. There is a mystery for players to unravel, and with enough exploration and clue-hunting, a way to solve the situation for the better. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem would be the perfect example of what I'm talking about.

In other words, make it bleak, make it desperate, make it lopsided, make the opposition beyond comprehension, but by God let us land a punch.