(for those wondering where I got lost who actually played the demo, it was near where you meet the NPC that sells you stuff also you can just look at picrel, i assumed that there was nothing under and it was just an elevated platform)
Im going to speedrun through the rest of the games merits because I didnt expect to type up this much about a demo anyway and am already getting tired of effort posting about something nobody is going to care about.

But if it wasnt obvious I think the game not letting you conveniently access a map for a meaningful portion of the beginning was to force you to have to actually mentally map, and remember how everything connects to another thing. And I only truly processed that this was a possible deliberate decision late into the demo when I realized that I hadnt even pulled up my map to check where I was going, even though I had easy access to it by now.

Talking about connections, this bring us to shortcuts. A lot of games (and retarded gamers) like to bring up "shortcuts" like a badge of honour of clever level design, but I have to imagine they just dont critically think while playing games because I can think of a dozen examples of games with shortcuts so superfluous that I often forget they have them (Ocarina of Time, Dark Souls 3, Almost every single metroidvania that isnt Hollow Knight and Super Metroid, including Symphony of the Night)

I will use Dark Souls 3 to prove my point about shortcuts though because I consider Dark Souls 1 the king of meaningful shortcuts.

Something that happened often in DS3, was that youd unlock a shortcut, and use it like once or twice because by the time youd find a shortcut, you already also found the next bonfire, so it served no purpose because you dont backtrack in the game (or in any souls games for that matter, but thats another topic) dont get me wrong, this doesnt mean "backtracking" is the answer. Even generic metroidvanias can make you "backtrack". Its about "backtracking" with PURPOSE.