At any point of your gaming life, you've wondered: "Is it good?", probably when you're looking in some game shop or searching for gameplays.
Well, in my humble view, there's a essential point that makes the whole game good: questioning your caracter's power and life.
That's why I see games like Untill Dawn and most of survival games making so much sucess, they force you to bound with the caracter and fear for its life, since you're the responsible for it. In other words, maybe your fear of failing is engine of your entirely fear experienced by the game itself.
About the caracter's power, I think it's deeply involved with some Nietzche's "will to power", if you're enable to do something or many thing, will you do anything at all? Or freeze completly? Hence, the negative expectation of your "powers" are more agonies add to your experience, more questioning and logical thinking to some a puzzle in the middle of the chaos, like old Resident Evil's franchise.
So, what makes a game a good one, is this whole catharsis or just a good story to tell?