Killer Escape is a series of Point-and-Click horror Games, developed by Psionic Games. You play a nameless character who has been kidnapped by a Serial Killer known as the Burner and stuffed in a cell. It becomes up to you to escape and traverse the tower belonging to the Observer and his many killers.
The series currently spans four titles, starting out as free online Flash games, then into full-fledged 3D games by the fourth title.
See also Being One, and Icescape, both sister series in a Shared Universe.
Killer Escape contains examples of:
- Alone with the Psycho: The first three games open with a cutscene where the antagonist approaches you, speaks about how you got here, then leaves you to escape. Played straighter in the 4th game, where the Burner is an ever-present threat at all times.
- Antagonistic Offspring: A few notes and a hidden diary in the second game imply that the Tooth Fairy is Abby Lintworth, daughter of famed facial surgeon Ryan Lintworth. She resents her father's perfect cosmetics to the point of undoing his patients' work via torture. Ryan himself denies any connections to Abby, which only enrages her further.
- Apocalyptic Log: Notes are scattered all over the place in each game, ranging from letters from previous victims, newspaper clippings, to data files from the villains themselves.
- Arc Villain: The killers who serve under The Observer. Each game has one as the individual antagonist who goes after the player:
- The first game has the Burner, a Pyromaniac killer obsessed with burning his victims.
- The second game has the Tooth Fairy, a Depraved Dentist who kills her patients.
- The third game has the aliens that serve the Observer in his experiments.
- The fourth game has the Burner Back from the Dead for another round.
- Borrowed Biometric Bypass: To open the exit door at the end of the 3rd game.
- Back from the Dead: The Burner makes a return appearance in the fourth game.
- Big Bad: The Observer, first mentioned in the second game but hidden throughout the series, is the overall antagonist. As his name implies, he watches and controls the Serial Killers in the building with an iron fist as part of his experiments to discover immortality and survive the incoming impact of the Nemesis dwarf star.
- Brain in a Jar: There's one in the 3rd game. You can poke it as much as you want, and even earns you points towards your final score.
- Canon Welding: Killer Escape 3 introduces the aliens from Icescape, and mentions characters and events from the Being One series, most notably that you are Venus Callahan.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Data logs in later games explain that the Observer has ordered the other killers not to kill you, because your unique tendency to survive made him curious to know more about you.
- Comet of Doom: Data files in the third game reveal that the reason the Observer collects so many subjects is to find the key to immortality before a rogue dwarf star called "Nemesis" enters the solar system and annihilates Earth via its orbiting cloud of debris.
- Death Is Cheap: Used as a game mechanic in the 4th game. With you having similar regenerative powers to Being One, you only return to the start if you die, but being trapped with the Burner constantly stalking the area doesn't make it easy to survive.
- Data Pad: The aliens use these as journals in the 3rd game.
- Depraved Dentist: "The Tooth Fairy", who chloroforms you the instant you enter the morgue of her surgery, and gets ready to torture you before being called away to her cell due to a sudden lockdown. Her namesake comes from the bodies of her victims having been left with a pillow and 1-pound coin left under their heads, with all their teeth missing to keep the police from identifying them.
- Easter Egg: The 2nd game's computer has some hidden responses to its text parser, if you know what to type. You can actually talk to the Observer if you ask, though he won't yet know you're not the Tooth Fairy.
- Evil Sounds Raspy: The Burner makes a wet, raspy laugh in the first game, likely as a side effect from the asbestos mask he wears.
- Foreshadowing: One of the first signs of the game's Shared Universe is various banners around the facility in the first two games, reading "Carnodyne Research Facility", with the familiar logo.
- Looking closely next to the dead rat in the first game will see the writing "DON'T OPEN THE LOCKER" scratched. Guess what you have to do, and what's going to happen?
- The Greys: The killers in the third game, who take you aboard one of their spaceships. They turn out to be the Observer's Mooks, staging abductions to capture his subjects for research.
- Hidden Villain: The Observer is never shown onscreen, only communicating through letters, and most of what is known about him comes from other characters.
- Insecurity Camera: You can break security cameras in the 2nd and 3rd games.
- Kill It with Fire: The Burner loves to do this to his victims in the first game, often torturing and mutilating them before they die.
- Mood Whiplash: You spend the first two games crawling through abandoned, run-down sections of an underground complex, fighting frighteningly insane but mundane killers. Then you suddenly enter a sterile, futuristic-looking area with aliens serving as the killers.
- Mr. Exposition: The Savage, an animistic, wolf-like killer kept imprisoned behind a force field on the alien ship. He explains everything about the Observer, Rycroft, and the Beings, in hopes that you'd have a better chance of finding them than he would. Each playthrough generates a subtly different explanation for good measure.
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Serves as a major Jump Scare in the first and second games. In the first, you must search through four lockers; three are empty, but a random one will have a burned, rotten woman suddenly fall on top of the player (then on the floor), and she has one of the fuses in her hand. In the second, inspecting a covered up corpse of one of the Tooth Fairy's victims will cause the corpse's face to be suddenly exposed to the screen.
- People Jars: Looking into a window in the third game shows an enormous silo filled with green canisters holding hundreds of specimens, which explains how Dr. Rycroft had these in the Being One series.
- Room Full of Crazy: In various flavors around the series.
- The prison cell in the first game, with several messages written in blood from its previous inhabitants.
- The Tooth Fairy's operating room contains X-rays, old photos, and computer files documenting her descent into madness.
- Your own graffiti in the fourth game.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: The Tooth Fairy describes one of her past victims this way, being able to endure her torture methods for up to a week, all while cursing the Tooth Fairy out with words that disturbed even her.
- Translator Microbes: The aliens implant you with a translation microchip in the third game.
- You Won't Feel a Thing!: Played with. While the Tooth Fairy preps her torture equipment in the intro, she gloats, "Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit... It's gonna hurt a lot!"
