There was the initial idea of selecting a character. I was working on getting the masks working but they kind of messed with the animations. Would've been a bit more time to get that worked out, so ultimately a single character was implemented.
Your chance of "survival" is tied to how well you can remember the tenants names and what differences may have caused a death scene. There are tells to when a door is safe to knock on, combined with who the tenant is.
Another concept idea was to have doors that looked like iconic doors in media. Ultimately that was changed to random color to keep with the Synty assets.