Welcome To The Creepypasta Sphere Of 1990s Multimedia Entertainment! [Part 1]

The creepypasta community has delved even further into the multimedia mines than I have. To them, there's a magic to finding and experiencing something intended to have educational or artistic value that unintentionally falls into the uncanny valley or is creepy by today's standards. The two most eminent examples, by a country mile, are The Museum of Anything Goes and Sonic's Schoolhouse. Both have been ripped, clipped, chopped, and parcelled out of context to suggest they are these aberrant, monstrous nightmare works, though in the case of The Museum of Anything Goes, that's actually true, but more on that and Sonic's Schoolhouse for another time. Nonetheless, multimedia has a quiddity that always sets itself up for unintentional nightmare fuel when viewed in a modern lens. When there's FMV, the stilted, robotic line reads often turn serious moments into nonstop hilarity. Edutainment games rarely have filters on their content, so you occasionally get R-rated material in software once sold at book fairs in elementary school. I'm looking at you, Wolf and Lion from Sanctuary Woods. Both of those games not only show video footage of the animals in question hunting and dismembering prey in complete, uncensored detail, but also depict their mating rituals and reproduction without a bat of the eye. Finally, when multimedia really embraced rendering art assets as 3D polygons, they rarely took half measures. They plastered every environment with butt-ass-looking low-res textures that often broke catastrophically in the best ways possible.

So, it should not come as a surprise that the two following multimedia games I am about to discuss have accrued a following thanks to YouTubers and Twitch streamers who have played them and done the usual overreaction stuff that gets clipped and spread around the internet. As a result, these games have become internet famous for out-of-context moments that may or may not mischaracterize the scenes in question or even the game's scope and sequence. Compared to the last episode, I'll spend more time trying to get to the bottom of how "earned" those moments are and whether the games in question have any merits beyond what catapulted them, at least briefly, into the minds of the internet and the creepypasta community. So, without further ado, let's get on with it!

Forestia

What Is It?

Forestia is a point-and-click adventure game cut from the same cloth as Heureka-Klett and publisher Tivola's highly successful "Quest for Knowledge" series, which features generally well-loved games like Opera Fatal, Physicus, and Chemicus. You control everything from the first-person perspective, and you navigate the environment by clicking in directions and transitioning into new scenes or set pieces in an almost slideshow format, much like the original versions of Myst and Riven. While there are dozens of transitional screens, there's always at least one collectible or photographable animal in every level. Forestia also mixes traditionally animated 2D sprites alongside 3D backgrounds and character models, and there's even a bit of FMV if you manage to get to the end of the game.

The game's format is wonky on paper, but I found it compelling enough. There are nine distinct chapters in Forestia, and the only ones set in place are the game's introduction, where you create a painting for "Daddyoak," the large, creepy 3D oak tree shown above, and a final farewell party that always marks the end of the game. The rest of the game's chapters are arranged via RNG, with the order being completely different with every playthrough. Some of these chapters amount to being nothing more than fetch quests or delivery missions. Others involve testing your knowledge of a concept foreshadowed in the game's dialogue beforehand, allowing you to prepare by using the game's encyclopedia. However, more often than not, these chapters culminate in a minigame or arcade sequence that eschews the game's point-and-click format. These minigames are by far the worst part of the game, as they mostly control like hot garbage, with the worst offender being a long sequence where you control a mermaid from a top-down perspective and have to navigate them to flip switches and trigger gateways to progress the story. Others feel like placeholders, like needing to determine animals from cloud shapes in the sky using an assortment of base parts. I did enjoy a kinder sequence in which you tracked down the source of late-night music to a thought-to-be-abandoned cabin, only to discover a banjo-playing jackrabbit. The creature invites you to play all of their instruments on a table after you repair them by attaching the proper parts in the right places, but doesn't force you to make a specific melody or tune; he asks you to jam out however long you want. All of that is to say the chapters vary greatly in quality and length, with some lasting no more than fifteen minutes, and others extending to the thirty-minute mark if you aren't great at dexterity challenges.

I mentioned an encyclopedia. Throughout your journey, you'll notice plants, leaves, and other objects you can click and collect. Doing so adds an assortment of flora to the pages in your in-game encyclopedia, which is notably empty when you first start the game. You can also use a camera to take photos of animals you see in the background and foreground, but your photograph topics are not every single animal or insect in the game. It's usually just the ones that animate and use the game's hand-painted 2D art rather than the ones that use 3D-rendered polygons. As is typical in games of this sort, the encyclopedia is where the greatest effort has been made to teach kids about the topic at the center of the game, which, in this case, is nature or environmental science, as Forestia promises on its box. The chapters and minigames have quick quips from their mission givers about what they involve and how they connect to earth science. Still, these conversations are usually pun-delivery mechanisms or scaffolds to learn about goofy one-off or recurring characters rather than environmental science concepts. So, it goes without saying that I am skeptical that Forestia accomplishes anything notably educational in its three to four hours of playtime. The game isn't hard, and I even saw an alternate "kid's version" that is even easier with less gameplay friction. In the normal version, navigation becomes the greatest barrier to beating the game, as the map is incredibly loppy and fractal-like in parts, with plenty of awkward dead ends to boot.

What Makes This A Nightmare?

Forestia is popular in the internet's creepypasta circles for one specific scene. That scene is unlike any other in the game and comes out of nowhere. In fact, if you Google "Forestia," you'll find the top result is a Reddit post in which self-proclaimed "adults" call this specific scene one of the most horrifying moments they have ever encountered in a children's game. So, what's the scene in question, and why has it entered the Pantheon of multimedia creepypasta folklore alongside The Meuseum of Anything Goes and Sonic's Schoolhouse? In Forestia, there's a chapter where, after the game's friendly woodland creatures bid you to go to bed, you awaken to find many of them imprisoned in cages, with those still alive beckoning you to challenge and defeat a menacing dragon. When you encounter the dragon, rendered in 3D, it speaks to you with glowing red eyes and tells you to solve a puzzle at a wizard's tower, which we later discover is a necromancer. As you make the long trek to the tower, you look at several of the dead bodies of your friends from before. On top of that, you watch their souls lift out of their desiccated corpses as they bid you farewell and wish you good luck on your quest. Replacing them are less savory creatures, such as spiders and centipedes. In an especially distressing moment, when you go to Daddyoak and his son, you find them also dead, but their eyes are empty, and their faces are stuck displaying pained expressions. Oh, and the entire level is played with a blood red filter on your screen for added measure!

Fun fact, in my seed, I got this chapter as the first one after the game's required introductory painting sequence. In my playthrough, which you can catch in this VOD, after about twenty minutes, I was running around in circles, not knowing what I needed to do, and utterly confused. And if you can't tell from my characterization of the chapter in question, yes, this is genuinely frightening stuff. I have no idea who thought it was kosher to include this in an edutainment game for kids, but it sure isn't! But what the creepypasta community sometimes overlooks is that there's another chapter that plays out very similarly. During the chapter with the mermaid minigame I groused about earlier, you find everyone in the forest in a creepy trance with swirly eyes and unable to communicate with you. However, as you inch closer to the middle of the woods, you hear faint singing, and when you reach a pond, you discover a trio of sirens. Luckily for you, the sirens just want you to help them regain their treasure that a kraken has taken, and don't follow Greek traditions, but the effect at the start is still very similar to the nightmare level with the dragon. There's another creepy chapter where everyone gets infected with a fungus. Still, the game plays up the comedy while teaching the concept of how fungal spores work and that we are constantly breathing mold and spores without even knowing it, and neither is that frightening afterall. Yeah, this game is weird!

Should You Play It?

Forestia is "fine" as a playing experience. Even with me fumbling around and running around in circles, not knowing how to get to many of the end-points of my missions, my playthrough capped out at the three-hour mark. Had I given a damn about collecting every piece of foliage or every photographable animal, my playthrough would have expanded by at least twenty to thirty minutes. Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed with the writing of these encyclopedia pages, which is why I had little motivation to collect them. Forestia pre-dates Physicus, Bioscopia, and Chemicus. Regardless, all three of those do a far better job of teaching the core concepts of major fields of scientific study in the wrapper of an adventure game. Sure, those games have some real bullshit puzzles, and their Myst-like sensibilities are rougher than Forestia's cozier structure. Nonetheless, Forestia doesn't accomplish much of what it promises. You don't end up with a fondness for any of the creatures you encounter, nor do you have earth science concepts crystallized in your hippocampus.

However, what about its notoriety on the internet and in the creepypasta community? Is that scene or moment everything it is billed up as? Honestly, yes. That nightmare dragon sequence is genuinely shocking, coming out of nowhere and deeply upsetting to experience. Even as someone who wanted to come in with a skeptical lens, naw, this chapter is creepy and completely out of place, and leaves a stronger impression on you than any other part of the game. The fact that you genuinely watch friendly woodland creatures die in front of your eyes, and their souls depart their bodies, is so brutal that you have to respect the developers for including it in the first place. The only criticism I can offer is that the impact is muted if you get the nightmare chapter early in your playthrough. As I didn't have earlier scenes setting up those characters, their graphic, traumatic deaths didn't have the same impact. But even then, the whole scene is a complete nightmare, and I genuinely tip my hat to whoever convinced their higher-up to include it because GODDAMN IT IS METAL AS ALL FUCK!

My Amazing Human Body (UK Version)

What Is It?

At some point, I'll likely need to air a "special" on Dorling Kindersley's multimedia works published under the label "DK Interactive Learning," but for now, let's settle on some basics. Dorling Kindersley, then known as DK, was a book publisher that was best known for a series of educational photo-based encyclopedias aimed at kids and early tweens. Their works operated under several names outside their country of origin, the United Kingdom, with most Americans likely able to identify them by their North American name, Eyewitness Books. And if that name rings any bells, then you're definitely a '90s kid and recall when Eyewitness Books' video series was the designated lesson plan whenever your teacher called in sick; that intro sequence lives rent-free in my brain. To return to the topic at hand, DK Interactive Learning was a MASSIVE purveyor of multimedia edutainment from the early 1990s all the way into the 2000s, until its parent company mistakenly overestimated the market for Star Wars books and had to organize a leveraged buyout to Pearson plc, which then made them a division of Penguin Books. After the semi-merger with Penguin, DK eliminated its games division and returned to just text materials.

My Amazing Human Body is connected to DK's ages six through ten materials and has a fairly admirable purpose. While it does go over the basics of the human body, its real purpose is to comfort and educate pre-teens about changes happening to their bodies that they might not feel comfortable discussing with teachers or parents. Now, I agree that it's fairly dubious at best to rely on a multimedia PC program to broach the subject of puberty with kids rather than having that start and finish with their parents or teachers, but in terms of frontloading vocabulary and helping kids brainstorm questions that are explored in a conversation with a trusted adult? The game does that, and I can at least understand what the developers of My Amazing Human Body were aiming for at the time of its release. However, it's the game's "tour guide" that I have major objections to. To guide kids on this awkward and uncomfortable journey is a fully 3D character named Seemore Skinless, who dances, plays, sings, and, most of all, displays all his body parts and organs for them to use to learn more about human biology. For example, one of the game's four playable sections lets you put Seemore Skinless under an X-ray or body-scanning device. When you click a bone or organ, you get a fully narrated lecture on that part and its importance to the overall human body.

My Amazing Human Body came out in 1997, and it's no secret why it has found a second life with the creepypasta community. For one thing, the model for Seemore Skinless is transparent, and while his organs are color-coded to be less graphic, it's still unsettling to look at him whenever he dances or gyrates. There's a minigame where your task is to lead Seemore through a normal day of his life, which includes him eating, exercising, and doing the normal goings-on you or I do, but in this case, you're watching a 3D, semi-transparent skeleton do it. Furthermore, the Seemore model has been ripped and is commonly used in animated .gif form to create humorous jump scares for unsuspecting readers of creepypastas on dedicated web domains for such materials, and even crops up in YouTube readings of creepypasta stories. The game accrued an even larger cult following when unused assets for the game were scraped and shared on the internet, one of which involves an unused cutscene where multiple copies of Seemore Skinless dance with scanned pictures of people's faces, likely the developers. Then there are the multitude of YouTube overreactors that have shared video highlights of their own personal playthroughs of My Amazing Human Body, presenting it as this unintentional horror gold mine.

Is This Game A Nightmare?

Answering this question really depends on your squeamishness with the human body. If even the slightest whiff of viscera, even in a cartoony or comical veneer, gets you queasy, then, yes, this game is as creepy as it is often presented on the internet. Nonetheless, I have genuine squeamishness regarding needles and have even passed out when needing to draw blood, and I can say with complete confidence that this game had zero effect on me. The game's narrator uses a calm, understated tone that occasionally becomes more upbeat as it draws real-life connections between what is being taught and children's common life experiences. Seemore Skinless is also a comedic figure that doles out puns at a breakneck pace. So, unlike the common reaction to the game on YouTube, I found Mr. Skinless utterly condescending and annoying by the time I exhausted all the game's activities. So, credit where credit is due. The game's developers went to painstaking lengths to avoid any part of the game coming across as gross, creepy, or awkward, and by 1990s standards, they likely met that goal. Now, looking at My Amazing Human Body in the year of our Lord, 2026, is a different issue entirely. Most of the cutscenes and animations play out against an eerie blank white background, and the then-cutting-edge 3D model for Seemore is peak '90s multimedia in every conceivable way. It has that shiny 3D polygonal look, and the limited animations when Seemore tries fine-motor activities, like sipping soda from a straw or riding a bicycle down a street, are laughable at best. And even if his intestines and liver are neon colors to ease off the edge of them being as visible as they are, you still watch him rip those parts out of his torso and abdomen as he implores you to learn more about them as you click them.

The other possible contrivance stems from My Amazing Human Body's unflinching insistence on covering all major aspects of human life, the good, the gnarly, the sticky, the stinky, and the bad, in fairly in-depth detail. That includes frank discussions about sexual reproduction and the inevitability of death. At face value, DK Interactive Learning tries its damndest to perform a tightrope act, surfacing topics that children need to know but should explore with their parents after learning about them in My Amazing Human Body. It even encourages kids to take notes in a journal when the game doesn't fully answer a question and to write the name of an adult they trust to ask those questions. Nonetheless, while the game's narrator's calm speaking voice does the game a favor with topics like puberty, the minute the topics delve into the "dirtier" aspects of bodily functions, the whole tightrope act falls apart. And again, should a video game be where a pre-teen starts their understanding of things like periods, sperm, pregnancy, and sexual intercourse? Probably not. Nonetheless, is any of that grounds for calling the game a horrifying affair, as YouTubers seem to have done? Eh, I'd say "no" as the game wears its heart on its sleeve. Is anything that it is conveying especially novel or groundbreaking? Not at all, and I will caution that its notions of gender reek of "era appropriate" text from the 1990s, with topics like transgenderism and gender dysphoria not represented in the slightest regard. But a "hidden horror gem" from the 90s? I can happily confirm that's completely overblown.

Should You Play It?

For me, this was a trip down memory lane more so than anything else I have covered as part of this series. While I never personally interacted with My Amazing Human Body growing up, I am familiar with this style of multimedia edutainment. In terms of 90s interactive encyclopedias, it isn't the worst I have come across, though it is far from being the best. There's a quiz show segment where you are prompted to answer questions about randomly selected body parts, and the game makes the point to say that you should complete the body scanning activity first to prepare yourself for the upcoming questions better. The rewards for completing any given activity are faint, though you can print certificates of completion if you have a home printer hooked up to your desktop. The life simulation minigame is the most bizarre addition to the game. As you try to get to the end of a full day of activities, you're encouraged to make sure Seemore plays a variety of games or exercises while also meeting his basic bodily needs. Unfortunately, your options cycle through randomly, so if you find yourself desperately trying to feed or relieve him, you'll often find yourself shit out of luck. And of course, there's a part in the game where you can make your own version of Seemore with different outfits and sizes for his body. The game, rather distressingly, challenges you to make yourself in the game using its tools, and that was too much for me.

Regardless, you don't need to check this out. The information in it isn't new or shocking, and the novelty of watching a comical 3D skeleton with whole organs in front of your eyes wears thin rather quickly. DK Interactive Learning's other works play up the gameplay aspect far more than this one does, with guided tours and single-player campaigns, but that's not the case here. Considering how much effort they put into the fully rendered 3D skeleton, they probably maxed out their budget or what they could fit on a standard-issue CD-ROM on that alone. Nonetheless, if you want to see me playing through almost everything there is to offer in My Amazing Human Body, I once again have you covered. It's a perfectly fine multimedia relic of a bygone era of edutainment where things could be oddly specific about a single topic or issue, and for the price of a normal PC video game.