The immersive sim genre is one that’s full of quirky delights as you figure out new and inventive ways to twist the world to your will with the abilities at your disposal. Skin Deep, though, is a game that’s more immersivey and simmy than most.
You see, this is the kind of game where sneaking through vents will raise a sneeze-meter until you loudly achoo and alert guards in the room below. It’s the kind of game where crashing through a glass window leads to shards of glass in your feet… because you have no shoes. Coming from Blendo Games, I’d honestly expect nothing less.
We played Skin Deep at New Game Plus last week – a new public show in the same spirit of WASD and Rezzed that’s part of London Game Fest – running through the tutorial and an opening level. There’s also a demo available on Steam, if you want to try it from the comfort of your own home.
You’re Nina Pasadena, an insurance commando who’s kept in stasis aboard starships transporting valuable cargo across the galaxy, to wake up and protect the ship from any pirates and gangs that try to board and ransack the place. What happens from there is basically Die Hard in space, as you sneak through vents, make use of your environment and try to take down the invaders one-by-one.
The opening tutorial is a wonderful snapshot of the game’s particular style of action. It’s a sequence of short moments, each themed around a particular control or navigation quirk, before skipping forward in time to the next moment. It feels like a bundle of highlights from a film, but also gives you a good tour through what the game offers.
Skin Deep is unashamedly individualistic, shall we say. The crew of the ship is made up of cats (which have all been captured and locked up in boxes for you to rescue), enemies can have a Skull Keeper ability which, in the case of death, detaches their head and slowly moves them back toward respawn points, and one of the most useful items you can find is black pepper to give enemy goons a nasty sneezing fit.
At that point, you can leap onto their back, guiding them around the room to smash into things until you’ve knocked them out. Then pop off their head and flush them down the trash or squat toilet to remove the threat.
You find interactive elements and moments in the strangest of places, such as smashing the front of a washing machine, releasing all the soapy water over the floor, turning it into a slip-n-slide with the emphasis on slip.
If you get hurt, you can heal yourself from a menu, with some great animations to complement the action. Glass in your feet? You’ll be pulling those shards out from your sole in rather gory fashion. Died in the blast from an explosion? Well, luckily, you can have an auto-defibrillator equipped that will kickstart your heart and give you a second chance.
The wider game seems to drop you into a stage to tackle how you see fit, stringing together a bunch of rooms, populating with enemies to defeat, cats to rescue, and hazards and things to interact with. How you take things on will be up to you. Do you take it slow and steady, making use of the fundamentals of stealth? Or do you learn how to embrace the sheer chaotic potential of your surroundings, blasting pipes, venting rooms by shooting out windows (from both inside and outside), and making the floors slick with soap? There’s sure to be some outrageously slick speed runs in a couple of months.
The twist in the tale is that, as is revealed at the end of the tutorial stage, it’s revealed that it’s not the ship’s cargo that the invaders are after. Sure, they’ve been trying to extract from the cat crew details about your location, but instead of just trying to figure out where the danger to their mission is coming from, it’s because their mission is actually to try and find you. Weird, huh?
All of this is rendered in Blendo’s chunky style. OK, so it’s not quite as chunky as Quadrilateral Cowboy, but it’s still full of retro tech, bright colours and the general vibes that you might expect from an 80s action film.
There’s a lot to like about Skin Deep’s riff on the immersive sim, and I’m keen to see how it all comes together later this month on 30th April.
