I leave the console room, the door closes behind me. I go through the door in front of me, next to a chest of some kind, and... I'm back in the console room, from the door I left it by. I turn around, go back through that door, and I'm in the second room, opposite the chest. Maybe the door I just left will take me somewhere new? I turn around, go through the door, and am somewhere else entirely.
Exploration in games is my jam. I enjoy any sort of exploration, really. Give me a set of mechanics to delve into and I'll enjoy figuring out what everything does, a time loop with a bunch of NPCs each on their own schedule that I can fill out in my journal, exploring their days? Yes please, be it in the form of manually restarting to avoid a moon dropping on my head or a perpetual 24-hour cycle in a cursed hotel. But exploring a physical space is still special, both in 2d and 3d. The map slowly fills in, and you can consult it whenever you need to. And with the size of some worlds these days? You need to. Not just in sprawling 3d open worlds, but 2d worlds as well - Hollow Knight is immense. Unless you're speedrunning, you're not going to be spending enough time in a world that large to internalize where everything is, sometimes you need to check the map to remind yourself which fast travel point is closest to your destination.
Something particularly interesting about digital spaces is that they can be constructed in all sorts of bizarre ways which can't be easily mapped. But something about our brains - or at least my brain - can connect the dots. "Double back on yourself at the fountain," is a means of getting from A to B that would be very difficult to depict on a map, but actually makes as much sense when forming a mental map of how to navigate a place as turning left at it.
The example at the top of the page comes from my memories of playing 1997's Doctor Who: Destiny of the Daleks. The fact that to navigate the TARDIS you have to learn to navigate a space that's designed in this way is one of the few things the game has going for it, sadly, and it is tricky to think of other examples where just giving a spoiler warning for them wouldn't in itself be a spoiler.
One potential pitfall with areas and worlds built in this way is that if regions and rooms aren't distinct from each other, navigating them can be miserable. Double back at the fountain and you'll move from the city streets into the castle is grokable. Double back in the third very similar-looking room to enter a fourth can become confusing. The same sort of problem can occur in games about exploring a space generally, of course, but without the ability to draw a map to help the player out, this increases the importance of tools for the player to mentally track where they are at all times.
This is a sort of experience that's a treat when it shows up and one that I hope to see more often going forward. Especially if a game inserts this sort of area into games that are more conventionally laid out.