Killer Bear is a waste of time, while Lisa and Skinwalker are flawed but do have things to recommend them for.

Killer Bear was awful.

The game is apparently supposed to be a “loving parody” of slasher films, which apparently means “really terrible slasher film writing, but it’s on purpose so that makes it ironic and clever”. The characters respond to a threatening phone call and bloody murder of one of their friends by repeatedly going off by themselves for increasingly trivial reasons. It’s not even done as an actual parody, which could be funny (“Oh no, what should we do?” “I know! If we only go places all alone, the killer is less likely to hear us!”) but just dull stuff like wanting to go smoke in the bathroom, so then they do.

The closest it gets to parody is calling the black girl the token black girl, which isn’t actually parody, it’s just a statement. No one really discusses the situation and they barely react to the deaths right in front of them, so I couldn’t feel the slightest concern for any of them. It’s also really heavy on cutscenes, which just took me out of the story further.

This image has already entertained me more than the entire game.

As per union rules, there are multiple endings. Some of these make a degree of sense, some don’t. I do like that your actions can actually prevent deaths, which is always a point of frustration in replays, though the mechanics leave a bit to be desired.

I would somewhat recommend Lisa.

Remember how I found the sexual abuse aspect of Dreaming Mary to be wholly appropriate? Lisa would be an example of when it isn’t. It isn’t even grabbing low-hanging fruit at this point, it’s picking it up off the ground. I will, in fact, go so far as to say that while the sex aspect is handled with decently unsettling symbolism (and a lot of variety), the game would have been stronger without it, because it really added nothing to a setting that already overflowed with obvious grossness.

It’s actually a disappointment, because the obvious grossness was actually a pretty strong point. It’s as inescapable as the father – you run away only to find yourself in new areas covered in both of them. It’s a videogame and a poor resolution one at that, but it still managed to make me feel trapped and disgusted by the worlds I was trying to explore. I also liked the touch that the character throws up if you interact with the toilets. Everything just hammers in how awful the places are. And the areas are enormous, which is one of those things RPGmaker makes too easy and too many people use without thinking, but it largely worked here because of how you didn’t want to spend any time there and yet had to.

(It also does the looping room thing, mind, and I’ve yet to see any decent use for that one.)

Anyway, I’d suggest playing it but don’t concern yourself with finding the “ending” tapes, as they’re just “hey so did you know this is about sexual abuse? sexual abuse!!!” Yes, game. Everyone got that within ten minutes of play, max. You had us complete a statue by attaching a sword between the legs. Subtle you were not.

And finally, Skinwalker…

Skinwalker is a disappointment, but a short one, and it’s about a creepy enough idea it’s probably worth a play. It’s really cutscene heavy – most noteworthy is where you leave camp to get wood for the fire, and by that I mean go three steps away, then a cutscene triggers showing you collecting firewood, then teleporting you to the lake, then back to camp. I have no idea why the designer made a whole map, put an entrance to the lake from there, then never let you actually use it. Letting you walk around more would really have helped built tension, as would having the weird sounds be more obvious and prey on the player’s mind, rather than having the character announce there’s creepy sounds and how he feels about it. And while I actually like that there’s no save, there’s also option to even skip the introductions, so you have to redo this every time you want to play and that kills tension. It should’ve just skipped to the night when stuff actually starts happening.

“…Actually, I would.” You’ll see a lot of that sort of quality writing in this game.

The idea of it is actually rather cool – once it gets done with the opening and you start trying to flee to the cabin, one of your friends falls and you can help her up and then you realize there’s one extra person… And at the cabin you keep seeing it lurking around when you make the mistake of looking through windows. The combination of darkness, isolation and a shapechanger is pretty great, but the game just doesn’t do anything much with it. The good end even has you pass out, then your friends collect you and talk about the epic battle they had with the monster that pretended to be you, which I’m assuming was a deliberate choice to do something unusual, but I’m really not sure it worked. And the author is trying to carry the ending entirely with their writing skills, which were just about passable (why does no one proofread?), except sprites are popping up to try to illustrate it but bear only a passing resemblance to the text and generally look far less scary

Also, while it has multiple endings based on your choices, they have no actual connection to your choices and so come off as totally random.