Apologies if you've answered this before, but is Skifree an early liminal horror game?
More of a parallel evolution.
A lot of early video games didn't have defined end points, instead simply continuing either until something structural broke because the developers didn't expect anyone to get that far, or until the game's difficulty curve mechanics went off the rails in a way that rendered further progress impossible – for example, a game where the baddies get faster with every level eventually reaching a point where they simply teleport directly to the player's location as soon as the level starts. These failure points are colloquially known as "kill screens".
Many contemporary liminal horror games are playing with similar ideas, often directly inspired by the creators' childhood experiences with video game kill screens. The notion of there being some inherent boundary built into reality beyond which the rules that are necessary for human life to exist break down pre-dates video games by a fair span, of course, but "what if real life had a kill screen?" is a very handy metaphor, and many liminal horror games make good use of it.
SkiFree, meanwhile, is parodying the phenomenon of video game kill screens by having a literal kill screen – i.e., a specific point in the game's progression where a big hairy monster just randomly shows up in an otherwise monster-free game and eats you.
