Mechanics are inseparable from, and an integral part of the rest of a game experience, narrative, mood, and all. And in a game like this with what it was trying to do, fixed camera angles are a significant mechanic that can and do affect specific mechanical experiences and functions on the player and how they engage with the game world which reinforce core narrative experiences and moods in ways that, though I didn’t play this remake and see how it changed things, feel and seem pretty fundamental to the experience.

Forcing you to move through the game world, and even feel claustrophobically stuck, within the confines of the oppressive clutches of fixed cameras, restricted vision, and commitment to meaningful actions and movements among the set design and especially sound design, are objectively powerful design choices which are significant in the ways they mechanically capture and reinforce the oppressive aspects of the story and environments, and of the horror, disorientation, mistrust, mental illness, trauma, repression, fear, lack of control and agency in one’s torments and constructs, etc. of the world and narrative; that I feel like would be significantly lessened and undermined with options and movement and vision being made freer and turned more into an “action hero game.”

Like I said I never played this remake and don’t keep up with modern games much so can’t speak specifically to how they managed to account for this and restructure things to reconstruct or “fill-in” some of these aspects or if they did (maybe they expertly did it), but not only do I strongly disagree that fixed camera angles are “objectively bad”— even just hearing there’s no fixed camera angles in this remake sounds actually really weird to me; like if you were to make a 007 Goldeneye remake that’s isometric view game, but much more extreme because Goldeneye isn’t a serious artistic game trying to say and do something real other than “be fun.” Or similarly if Fatal Frame didn’t make you have to use the camera to see the spirits etc. The mechanics are inseparable from the point of the game. And the more serious the game’s narrative is the more the mechanics matter in how that narrative is experienced and so the story “told” (or lived, via the player through the characters mechanically)