The thing that gets me the most about so-called "mascot horror" is that, for all that it depends on predatory marketing toward a child audience, one of the most consistent througn-lines of the genre is that it seems to regard actual children as existentially horrifying. Every last one of these games apparently takes place in a universe where metastasising into some vast eldritch monstrosity is the normal course of childhood development, and it requires carefully maintained special conditions for the process of maturation to yield a regular-ass adult.