Bond says, "The important thing here is that [the designer] is giving players choice and demonstrating to them them that their choices matter."

I had exactly the opposite experience. The convention in side-scrollers is that the goal is to get to the end by moving right, so I did that. There are no obstacles along the northern edge of the world, so I basically just held down the right arrow for several minutes until the game ended.

I briefly tried going south, but it didn't seem to matter. The score counter seemed to be just a measure of how far to the right I'd moved.

I never noticed the treasure chests Bond mentions.

The supposed brilliant subtlety of this game was lost on me.

But then, I'm the only person who didn't like Andor, so...