It was very effectively designed! A lot of games would just have gone 'all players have to do the horrible thing and feel bad'; I'm sort of impressed that this one was willing to include a 'don't do the horrible thing' option, changing the overall outcome to 'some players don't do the horrible thing at all, but the people who do feel so much worse'.

It's really interesting to see a non-videogame example of this! I was struggling to think of any, but it makes a lot of sense that identifying too much with an unpleasant protagonist would inspire similar uncomfortable feelings.