I’ve spent the last twenty minutes slowly clearing this space mining vessel of pirates, freeing all but one member of its crew, a crew which is of course composed of talking cats. I used a bar of soap to cause one to slip, then jumped on him and smashed his head into a wall. I threw a coffee mug in front of a mining laser to lure another one into position before obliterating him with a ‘workplace accident.’ I found the vent codes to stealthily sneak around and get the drop on two more. Finally, I’m left with one guy on the bridge guarding the last cat.
Unfortunately, there’s a security alert going and my radio is out of battery, so there’s an active turret that will perforate me if I get anywhere near him. Right before I opened the bridge, I found the post-it note for the airlock, so fortunately I was able to sabotage the door to space and vent the last guy without having to confront him directly.
Immersive sims are all about the little stories you can create using a unique mix of mechanics, and these are the types of stories you’ll be making when playing Skin Deep, the latest game from indie darling Blendo Games. The two easiest pitches for this game are “Die Hard in space” or “first person Heat Signature,” but that only begins to scratch the surface of what this game is about. You play as Nina Pasadena (one of the all-time great character names), an insurance commando for MIAO Corp who is cryogenically frozen on spaceships and thawed when something goes wrong on board. This seems to happen quite frequently, as a group of pirates called the Numb Bunch is out to get you. If this premise sounds weird, I assure you it only gets weirder from here.
When I first heard of Skin Deep, I initially assumed that it was going to be one continuous spaceship a la Prey that you played in throughout the entire game, but instead the game is broken down into discrete levels. Every level has the same objective, free the feline crew that’s been trapped by the pirates and call an extraction pod. Once you get to the pod, you get a chance to load up on weapons to take out the incoming pirate reinforcements in a wild shootout. It’s a perfect setup that gives you a solid structure, while still providing variety through clever level design.
Each of these ships you’re on is fairly small in scale, only four to six rooms for the most part, but they’re densely packed with carefully-gated shortcuts. Colored keys bar specific doors, and a series of fuse boxes need to be activated in order to access things like vents, trash bins, exterior windows, and airlocks. This makes for a perfect ramp up for each stage, starting with a very desperate and claustrophobic feeling that slowly unlocks until you have complete mastery of the level, slipping in and out of shortcuts to deftly evade your foes.
And evade your foes you must, because Skin Deep isn’t about running and gunning your way through these pirates. When you do find a gun, it’s a big deal that really makes you feel unstoppable. Most of the time you’ll need to rely on stealth and wits to take this ship back, using common objects to create often hilarious traps to take out the pirates. Sometimes you’ll be using banana peels to cause them to slip or stun them with a box of particularly strong pepper, while other times you’ll be doing more complicated things like creating a flammable cloud of hand sanitizer, luring a pirate over by playing some music from a radio, then throwing a lighter at them to blow it all up in their face. Once airlocks and windows get unlocked, you’ll be able to do the most satisfying thing of all – launching your enemies into the cold reaches of space.
The interesting wrinkle to this is that ‘killing’ a pirate isn’t the end of the line for them. They all come equipped with Skullsaver technology, which pops off their head and sends it hovering over to the nearest respawn platform, where they’ll have their body restored. To fully eliminate them, you’ll need to take their head and dispose of it, either by throwing it in a trash can, venting it into space, or flushing it down a toilet. Transporting one of these heads takes up one of your five precious inventory slots, so you want to make sure you’re getting rid of these fairly soon after acquiring them, as you’ll need all the tools you can pick up if you want to survive. It’s such a compelling wrinkle to add to your planning process, while also building the weird world of Skin Deep, which is so full of quirky details like this.
As fun as it is to come up with ways to take out these pirates, sneaky players will find it’s possible to free the captive kitties without actually killing your enemies. Cat keys are either found in the world or carried by the pirates as they patrol the ship. Sneaking behind the guard allows you to pickpocket them, which comes with some fun pickpocketing music, but they will immediately start to look around after figuring out they’ve been robbed, so you’ll need to be able to duck into a hiding spot pretty quickly afterwards.
One of my favorite tools in the game, the duper, can also help with acquiring keys, or any other item. Say you’re up in the rafters and there’s two guards patrolling below and you’ve got no means to take them out. With the duper, you can just point it at the key in the guard’s back pocket and make a copy of the key, easy peasy. It’s got limited charges, so you’ll have to be smart about what things you want to duplicate, but it’s the kind of tool that makes you feel like a genius when you use it at just the right moment.
To me, the sign of a good stealth game is how fun it stays when you get found, and Skin Deep is just as much of a blast when things go wrong as it is when your plan comes together perfectly. If you happen to be spotted by a pirate, and you will frequently, an alarm goes off on the whole ship. Not only do they start looking for you, starting with your last known spot, but turrets and drones are also deployed, making the ship even more deadly than before. If at any point you get hurt, you’ll not only lose health, but you’ll have to stop to take a moment to heal yourself by pulling out the glass or bullet or whatever else pierces your body. This will stop things from getting worse, but you’ll still need to find one of the ship’s health stations in order to recover fully.
Thankfully, the smart interconnected nature of the game allows you to find hiding spots where you can regroup and figure out your next move. In order to call off a security alert, you’ll either need to get to the comms on the bridge or find one of the pirate’s radios to call in the all clear, which Nina does with a hilariously bad fake gruff voice. Be careful though, because radios only have three charges, so it’s not an infinite get out of jail free card. Eventually, they’ll start doing crew check ins, and if you don’t answer the radio for a guard you killed, that can trigger an alert too, so proper management of radio charges is crucial to your success.
In order to gain mastery over the ship, you’ll have to fully explore to solve all the codes for the various fuse boxes. These become fun little quests of their own, told through various notes that range from Post Its written by either the pirates or the crew to datapads that need to be stolen from the pirates to be examined. The micro narratives you stumble across will lead you to the solutions to these puzzles. You’ll see little rivalries play out between people who are hiding passwords from each other, leading you to take out a particular pirate for the code, or maybe a note from someone confessing they lost the password reminder in a specific location, sending you on the hunt there. It’s an elegantly diegetic way to force you to pay attention as you comb through every inch of these compact ships.
Your wrist computer will provide you with a basic layout map, but there are in-world map stations on the walls that will allow you to highlight the locations of cats, people, fuse boxes, or other useful information that will help you get your bearings. Being able to sneak up to one of these info screens and check out how many guards are in the room or where the nearest health station is always feels great, and keeping track of where they are will help as you navigate the levels.
Each of the stages have their own little gimmick that sets it apart and gives it a ton of character, both narratively and mechanically. The laundromat ship may have more access to soap, which is a powerful tool to create slippery areas for your opponents, while the restaurant vessel may have more pepper and bananas to set up traps. Each of the thirteen levels comes with its own set of three objectives that will dig deeper into the unique aspects of the level, hinting at how to get the most out of your time there.
One of my favorite levels was the post office ship, which had several PO Box keys hidden throughout, along with notes that could be found explaining what was in them or which box goes with which key. It was a fun little side quest that eventually led me to getting one of the rare firearms that helped me clean up the ship in no time flat. I won’t spoil it here, but there’s a later mission that had me cackling at the possibilities when I saw the ship’s description on the loading screen. Now that I’ve beaten the game, I’m excited to go back and dig into these extra objectives that I missed to get the most out of the incredible levels that the team over at Blendo Games has put together.
In between missions, there are a few story sequences that help fill in the wild world of Skin Deep. You’ll find out the motivations behind the Numb Bunch’s mission to kill you, which has ties to Nina’s morally dubious past, as well as meet a quirky cast of characters, mostly feline in nature. Some of this happens through emails, but occasionally you’ll have an actual narrative level that you’ll walk through, which features not only great writing but also Blendo’s signature style of storytelling. Much like their previous hit Thirty Flights of Loving, you’ll see very film-like montage techniques used, sometimes doing hard cuts in the middle of scenes and dropping you to a later moment. It’s delightfully jarring and wholly unique, adding a special sauce to the already fun narrative.
Skin Deep has a visual style that matches the narrative’s quirk, with a vibe that’s inspired by 60s spy stories and retrofuture tech. Everything on the ship feels chunky and tactile, colored with a wonderfully vibrant palette. While the humans have normal, if cartoonish, proportions, the cats are all constructed out of big cubes, which is consistent with the style of some of their earlier titles. The music also contributes to the 60s spy feel, including a wonderful theme song for Nina that plays during the Bond-like credits sequence. It’s the perfect presentation for an immersive sim that’s a mix of tense sneaking and wacky, cartoonish action.
The one blemish on the game for me was that it did feel like it could have used a little bit more technical polish, as I ran into a few bugs in my 12 hours of playtime. Most of them were cosmetic, but a few times I ran into ones that were actively frustrating. Several times, I had no audio except for menu noises when loading into a level, which is challenging for a stealth-based game with lots of sound cues. Twice I had full crashes at critical moments that lost a good amount of progress through the level, and it was frustrating to try to jump back in and figure out which steps I needed to redo. I’m hoping some of these things get ironed out quickly (I just saw an update available on Steam right now), because it did end up hampering my experience a little bit.
One of my favorite things in video games is a sandbox that gives you the tools to come up with your own crazy solutions, and Skin Deep does that in a way that manages to be equal parts exhilarating and hilarious. It’s a perfect immersive sim formula that makes it feel just as good to recover from a failure as it does to see a plan executed flawlessly. Each level is presented with expertly-crafted, tightly-designed layouts that feature loads of personality and hidden nuance for those that put in the time to master the locations. And to top it off, the writing and style is top notch, with a fun cast of characters and an out-of-this-world setting. It may not reinvent the immersive sim, but it’s one of the most satisfying examples of the genre that I’ve seen in a long time.
Skin Deep is available now on Steam. Review code provided by the publisher.
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