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Skinwalker opens with a quick guide to the control scheme. It's not that I was expecting a title screen, per say. Really, I'm not sure what I was expecting.
Maybe it didn't happen as I saw it. But more on that later. We were all going out camping. Me, and three friends from university.
Now might be the time to mention that this game is full of text. All of it is terrible.
Or actually, I would.
You'll notice this is the second time the narrator has contradicted himself in twice as many sentences. This is the game designer just getting you ready for the excellent storytelling to come.
He's the one that always gets us all out of the house and into the action. He's the first one to hit on that cute girl by the bar, he's the first one to jump from the roof into the swimming-pool. According to himself, he was even more impulsive when he was a kid. I can only imagine his childhood, and how often he must have broken his leg, scraped his knees and hit his head. Still, if it weren't for Darren, we wouldn't have half the amount of fun we have.
Joe is probably right to be unsure of Darren's status as group leader. I'm getting more of a token tool vibe from him myself.
We met each other when she moved into the house next door when I was 7. My mom told me to go show her around the neighbourhood and after that we were inseperable for a few years. She's a nice girl, although her health isn't the best. She has some kind of heart problem, which I forgot the name of.
That's okay Joe, It's completely normal to forget the name of your best friend's debilitating illness. I'm sure it's not an author cop out at all.
This forced her to be away from school during extended periods of the time during her childhood. Because of this, until we started university, I was her only friend. Still, she never complained and I've always seen her as a positive, happy girl.
I don't have any overwhelmingly bad qualities, but on the other hand I don't have any overwhelmingly good ones either. I live in this apartment a short walk from my university. This is where us four friends usually gather before going out.
Everyone meet our protagonist, Joe. I hate Joe. 
He's my neighbour, living in the apartment next door. One day, while I had Celeste over, he just barged in. "Hey man, your place looks pretty nice, mind if I join you for dinner?", he said. As you can imagine, he's pretty pushy. I don't think he realises it himself. He came over several times after that day. After that, we somehow naturally became friends.
Darren said his family had a cabin a little bit into the forest. So camping we went. It could be fun, right? Of course me, Michael, and Celesete disliked the idea of staying in a cabin. It's a camping trip. We have to sleep in the wilderness. So Darren told us about the woods near the cabin. I don't remember much about the trip to the cabin. We joked around, took a few breaks. Normal stuff. Either way, we drove up to the cabin and left the care there. We took a short break in the cabin and set out into the wilderness. We went pretty far in, I can't say how far in the distance exactly, but it took several hours to get to where we set up camp. The first day we just screwed around, nothing abnormal happened.
Darren, the adventurous leader, is the only member of the group who wanted to stay in the cabin rather than go sleep under the stars. Seems legit.
Welcome to Skinwalker. You are currently viewing... oh, one fifth of the entire game. There's a bit to the east and north east of this map that we'll see next update. We'll actually see an entirely different screen before we see any of that though. It's worth mentioning that Darren is asleep and you can not interact with him at this point of the game. He's also the only character you can consistently phase entirely through. If the author were a clever man, I might assume this was commentary on his shallow existence. There's actually a much sillier reason that we'll go over later in this update.
Celeste gives us our first objective. Gather some water so that she can cook us up some grub. Looks like we'll need some firewood for the fireplace too. I'm sure Michael can...
Fix us some wood for a fire, will ya?
Oh screw you, Michael. So as the rest of our lazy friends just sit around doing absolutely nothing, Unremarkable Joe here has been tasked with gathering water and firewood. You can see in the above screenshot a pile of wood. You might be thinking to yourselves "Oh, here's where we'll see the rest of the map."
Ahahaha... No. You see, what would be the welcome relief of a fetch quest is actually a scripted sequence where that pile of wood and two others just kind of fade away to symbolize that we've picked them up. It does scroll over the map, but it's an entirely unimportant sequence of events. The true horror starts on the next screen where we find a pleasent little stream with some chirping birds and... what's that?
It doesn't sound like something you'd hear in a forest...
Oh Joe, and you said you had no special talents. Clearly you are a master of the obvious. 
Not bothered at all by the strange metal noise in the forest, Joe scoops up a bucket of water and heads back to camp. In the next update, more thrilling action! (If you felt Shenmue would have been better without all those pesky QTEs.)