Pasted

You're doing amazing work. You've put so many thoughts I've had about new players trying video games into actual usable products. It's wonderful!
 I've got a distinctly strong memory of my early days in games, and I've been trying to get my non-gamer cousin into these things. There's probably a decent chunk I can share.
 My cousin is being thrown into Undertale fairly blindly. No previous experience, no idea what the game holds, and so on. My thinking was that there's no /actual/ "surprise action". Yes, there's random fights and encounters, but they load into a controlled menu with no pressure to react to the initial start of the fight. Players know when they're going to potentially deal with action-y segments because it only ever happens at the end of a set of menu options. My cousin's jumpy about sudden action, so I thought that giving her control about when it happens, and *very* clear telegraphing it before it actually does happen, would help put her at ease.
 I was right. Games where she can see enemies coming from far away and try to avoid them still frazzle her, but ones where it's just part of life to go "Okay, at random, I'll blink a few times and be thrown into a menu" seems a lot easier to accept. Annoying, yes (I don't think there's a soul on this earth who likes random encounters), and sometimes annoying enough that she had to take a break, but not /scary/.
 She hated being chased by Undyne, I assume since that broke all of the conventions she's used to about "being in danger".
 Currently, she's hung up on separating game logic from immersion. I don't know how to word it better than that, so here's some examples:
 1) Any time blue attacks come, if enough come at once, she absolutely freaks out and starts moving to dodge them anyway. If she knows one or two are coming, she's fine, but the Papyrus fight was especially odd because, sometimes, she'd be fine standing still for a solid five seconds, then suddenly start to panic and try to run away from bones that were coming at her faster than she can move. She even knew she was running right towards an impossible situation and said "I can't escape it! It's going to get me!" a few times, as if she utterly *forgot* that you can stand still to become invulnerable to blue attacks.
 My theory is that since she got to stand still and watch what's happening, she got out of a super-strict logical mindset and started getting emotional. That's fine, that's a big part of video games as an artform, but she got herself so worked up that she took damage. This is also an acceptable thing, but with my cousin in particular, she began to panic once that first hit-sound registered with her, and it kept snowballing. From there, it snowballed further into a lack of confidence, and I'm pretty sure she would've dropped the game if she didn't like Papyrus as a character as much as she does.
 2) During the married-dog fight near Snowdin, there's an attack where an axe spawns on the left side and right side of the screen. They jump up and hit the middle, then jump and hit the edges again. The *only* way to dodge this attack is to sit at the bottom of the screen, then move from the middle to either edge, then back to the middle.
 My cousin instead always moved up with the axes. I think this is because of the shape of the sprite; there's more blank or "safe" space near the middle of the screen during a jump, even though actually going there is suicide. She'd always, and I mean _always_, go for it. I took a solid ten minutes to explain how to just move left and right to dodge the attack, and she said it makes sense, but she still got tripped up. At one point, I even showed her how to dodge it, she said it makes sense and looks "reasonably" easy ("but it's another thing if I can actually /do/ it"), and then happened to die a few seconds later to an unrelated attack. When she got to this point again, I reminded her of what I showed her and asked if she wanted me to do it again. She said she remembers... And then proceeded to move her heart up towards the suicide-spot immediately, all while screaming in panic and saying "I know I should stay on the bottom but it's too scary I can't do it!"
 The repeated deaths from this one attack eventually killed her spirit and I had to do the fight for her. (She musn't be denied of her Papyrus.)
 3) I think we can all relate to this one. During the Mad Dummy fight when you have to dodge his projectiles and make him hit himself, my cousin figured out what to do almost immediately after the first accidental strike. I think Undertale's dialogue at that point was critical in driving that point home; the damage sound by it's self might not've been enough. Anyway, even though she knew what to do, she internally had a huge struggle with actually pulling it off. She was used to dodging the attack in a particular way that almost always worked, but purposely trying to make the projectiles hit something else made her work differently, and she started getting hit. It made her feel unsafe and she got frustrated enough that we had to put the game down for the night.
 Based on these points, I think it's best that, when someone is entirely new to video games, concepts are not altered once they are introduced. For example, if you spend most of your Mario-style game convincing players that all coins are good and give 1 HP upon being touched, you should not introduce "disguised coins" in a later level that randomly turn into enemies when you get close.
 Such concepts do exist in other games, and a lot of gamers are used to them already. If you're having trouble relating, think of it this way: If you're playing a horror game and you get scared, what do you do? You pause the game, right? And then you take a few seconds to collect yourself and emotionally come down back into a state where you can control your own actions again, and then you think about what you actually need to do, unpause, and (hopefully) do it.
 ...But imagine if, even just once, after being paused for 15-20 seconds, that enemy suddenly burst through the pause screen, yelled "THAT BULL AIN'T GOING TO PROTECT YOU FOREVER!", and killed you. You're never going to trust pause screens again. If you were relying on pauses to keep yourself sane, you might not even play the game anymore.
 We don't know what game mechanics new players will use to keep themselves sane. If we start taking mechanics away or altering them, it may present a unique gaming experience to someone seasoned, but it might appear as scary as a "violated pause screen" to someone new. I don't think that is a good experience to introduce too early into someone's gaming life.
  As for my own experiences: The first game I was really excited to play was Super Mario 64. I distinctly remember that when I first got it, I just wanted to climb trees in the back of the castle. When I eventually discovered I can jump through paintings after _three hours_, I actually hated the experience. Suddenly things could hurt me, stuff was moving on it's own, and I didn't even immediately understand that the goal was to obtain a star, or how. It took another _four weeks_ for me to get that far. I'm not kidding. Four weeks, during which I had no idea what I was doing, and the only reason I even tried to battle King Bombomb was because my dad was egging me on for some reason. Without that, I don't think I'd have _ever_ progressed. I would've stopped playing outright if I had friends at school and could go to them for entertainment instead.
 I think I felt this way because the game (appeared to) change(d) what I expected from it. It's in line with my theories about my cousin's experience with Undertale thus far.
 Once I figured out that the goal was to get stars, I bragged to a neighbor about it and we started a competition to get every star and beat the game. I don't believe I would've tried to finish it if it wasn't for that; exploration is not a desire of mine. It still isn't. I believe this is personal preference, but it brings an important point up: We shouldn't assume that somebody new will enjoy a game for the same reasons that you or I do. 
  There's a few kinds of "scary" in SM64 that I've experienced. At the time, I lumped them all into one category, just called "fear" or "scary", but as an adult, I can identify them better. The first scary level was the castle it's self; I'm absolutely terrified of the unknown, and just going and opening new doors scared me real bad because I couldn't see what was on the other side. When I opened and loaded a new area, everything came up at once, and once I came to expect this, the fear only got worse. Doors in general started to scare me. Paintings weren't as bad for some reason. The fade-in and fade-out might'be helped, or maybe the fact I was dropped and had a few seconds to see surroundings come up from the bottom of the screen.
 That same fear manifested the whole time I was fighting King Bombomb.
 Later comes the Secret Aquarium, where you have to get eight red coins to make a star spawn and you're under water the whole time. There's no way to surface and breathe. Coins restore air, but this was not what I was used to seeing coins as. At this point, coins were "That thing that if I ever got 100 of, I get a star, but nobody got time for that so we can ignore them". They were not "healing" devices because I actually didn't get hit much, and they were not "air" devices because coins were "supposed" to have one purpose: To be ignored. It took me a while to figure out what I even had to do, and when I did figure it out, it scared me even more because I knew that I only had a limited amount of coins to heal with, and I'd have to find an optimal path to take me to all eight red ones to avoid drowning. I wasn't used to this sort of path-optimization yet, so I had issues remembering what the layout of the level was like, got myself turned around a lot because of all the fish and bubbles moving around, and always felt very helpless whenever I made an attempt. Doing it once did not seem to help me do it a second time; until /years/ later, that level was always hit-or-miss.
 Diving deep in Jolly Roger's bay was scary for those reasons too, but also because I just have a general fear of deep water. Whirlpools make me especially nervous since they help give me a sense of scale.
 Later levels that introduced new mechanics scared me because they were new. The pacing felt a bit different because the first set of levels in the castle only shows you how to use what you already have and can always do, while later levels start giving new items to interact with. It's a distinctly different sensation for me.
 Some levels scared me just from the music.
 The piano in Boo's Mansion is evil incarnate.
   I got lucky with the Bowser fights. During the first one, I got *absurdly* lucky and, purely by accident, managed to pick him up by the tail within six seconds of the battle starting, and then equally accidentally threw him into a bomb. The entire fight took maybe twenty seconds. I didn't do any of it entirely intentionally. I was just trying to hide and my hand slipped and hit B at the right time. I paniced and tried to pull a U-turn, paniced more because suddenly Bowser's in front of me again, thus doing one full 360 by mistake, paniced even /more/ because Bowser's in front of me again, and I hit B on instinct to "back out" like I was at a menu. The timing happened to be perfect, Bowser hit a bomb, and it only took one to end the first battle. The full realization of what I did hit me a few seconds after everything happened.
 Later fights felt comforting because I knew what to do, and I ended up finding out I'm gay and furry later, so Bowser was always viewer as someone friendly. My childish mind saw me throwing Bowser into balloons that didn't really hurt him. I'm not sure how I tuned out the explosions. I very distinctly remember them not registering as /explosions/. Due to all this comfort, it was easy for me to focus on the mechanics instead of getting overwhelmed with emotion. The second fight ended *very* fast, and I'm not even sure Bowser even ever managed to breathe fire until after the first mine on the second fight, and it only happened because I wanted to let him walk around a little.
 The final fight was torture. I still don't like that fight. It took years to get there, and 4-5 hours (at least it felt that long) to beat him, and I had to pass the controller off to multiple different people and let them try. I'm not sure who eventually did it; I disconnected pretty hard once the arena started changing shape and everything felt too different.
   I distinctly remember never having an issue with the camera. I understood it intuitively. I believe this is because I used to play with RC cars a lot during this time, so third-person perspectives with me controlling something not directly connected to me weren't anything new. SM64 was like an easier RC car where I didn't have to remember to "steer backwards" when the car was driving towards me. I push a stick, Mario goes in the direction I push, relative to the camera (which I just registered as "relative to me" at the time). Back when I first started doing RC stuff, this was a much harder concept for me. If you ever introduce someone to a third-person game, it might need more aids and different approaches just to help people deal with the camera.
 I don't think it should be called "the camera", either. I've always felt like that term was hugely inaccurate. I don't know what to actually call it, though.
   I could go on for ages about my introduction/discovery to other genres, but I think they're out-of-scope for your current project. Poke me if you want my memories on those, or more cousin-experiments. She's been trying to get into gaming and we both feel like there just isn't enough material to educate people who have to hold a job and do adult responsibilities in this area; when you're a kid and can put ten hours per day, seven days a week, into messing around, it's easy. You just don't get that as an adult, not without losing money or friends or something.
 We really do need Phonics for video games.