There’s a library in Skin Deep that really isn’t screwing around. It’s in outer space for one thing, and for another its calm, ordered stacks are protected by fidgety electrical gates that zap you if you’re trying to move through them with a book you haven’t checked out. Check enough books back in, meanwhile, and you’ll be rewarded with a gun. I suspect this place is a librarian’s dream.
Because Skin Deep is an action game, this library on a space ship has been overtaken by raiders who now patrol its corridors and have taken its original crew hostage. Your job, as a sort of insurance assassin, is to turn up and get rid of the raiders, and in this task the library itself can be both accomplice or annoyance. That gun will help, for starters, but how can you collect enough books to earn it when there are patrols everywhere and security cameras watching for you from every corner? Then there are the books themselves. Books, as anyone who’s ever moved house will know, are heavy things. Maybe you can lurk up high and bean your enemies with them? But, hey, what about those electrical gates? Maybe you can sneak a book into the pocket of a passing raider and watch as they get zapped?
To whit: Skin Deep is not just an action game, it’s an immersive sim, those magical games made of emails and stray notes, of patrols routes to insinuate yourself into and multiple paths through a level to be teased out and exploited. These are stealth games, but only in the way that a cat is stealthy as it tracks a mouse. Really, the stealth is just another way of toying with the foe, arranging the environment, waiting for the best of all possible moments to strike.
And Brendon Chung, of Skin Deep developer Blendo Games, has been threatening to make an immersive sim since his players first descended in that elevator, down, down into the mingling throng of a bizarre clifftop cocktail party at the start of his ingenious short game Gravity Bone. Gravity Bone players were at the cocktail party to dress up as a waiter, locate a very specific guest, and then poison them. This is a moment that receives a callback so good in Skin Deep that I actually stood up and cheered – and then, embarrassed, had to pretend to everyone nearby that I was just choking.
But Gravity Bone was a cinematic toy that pretended to be an immersive sim. Deep down it had more in common with the theme park rides that it had taken so many of its environmental tricks from. This is not a criticism. Gravity Bone, and its pseudo sequel, Thirty Flights of Loving, are two games I would share with anyone, booting them up and then watching their faces, expectantly, annoyingling, to ensure they love them as much as I do. But they weren’t immersive sims. Neither – although it got close – was Quadrilateral Cowboy, to which Skin Deep at times feels like a pseudo sequel. Oh, maybe it was? Quadrilateral Cowboy was a stealthy puzzle game about coding. Okay, it was very close to an immersive sim, but I want to argue that its other concerns kicked it free of any individual genre.
Skin Deep, though, is a perfect genre piece. It’s immersive and it simulates. It’s hard enough to be a challenge, but it’s broad enough and rich enough for every challenge to become a chance for you to really enjoy yourself. Like the planets you strobe through in one of its ingenious cut-scenes – man, I want to spoil that one here, I have so much to say about it – it exists in a kind of goldilocks zone. All the elements are just right.
Immersive sims are built from bits and pieces, and few designers are as good at bits and pieces as Blendo Games. And so when you’re dispatched on each mission in Skin Deep – another ship has been hijacked and its crew imprisoned – you know exactly what you’re going to get and yet not quite how you’re going to get it.
You know there will be crew to rescue. In Skin Deep’s world, these will be cats, and they’ll be chained up in sort of cat dispensers that are located around the ship. Getting the keycards for these dispensers and then getting the cats to an escape pod generally counts as the victory conditions for each level – with the added twist, of course, that rescuing the cats brings in raider reinforcements you then need to dispatch.
But! You never know what kind of ship you’ll be turning up at, and so rescuing the cats will often have interesting wrinkles. There’s that library for starters, but other great ships in Skin Deep include restaurants and post offices, and they all come with gimmicks, like kitchens and dumb waiters to carry food back and forth, or walls of post office security boxes for you to find the keys for. One of the levels has a secret area that you need to press two buttons in quick succession to get into – but the buttons are so far apart and there’s only one of you! Another – my favourite – is a deep space observatory. I had to rescue the cats, but I also refuse to walk past a telescope without first having a quick look.
Then there are the raiders, often heavily armed, and generally spread about the compact but multi-room ships on patrol routes. The raiders, in true ImSim fashion, are too powerful to take on directly so you pick up bits and pieces lying around and use them to even the odds. A rifle will blast them away instantly, sure, but it will be loud and you’ll soon have other raiders moving in on your positions. Maybe a box of pepper from a vending machine – maybe they need that kind of thing in space – will distract them as they chase down a sneeze, or a banana will slip them up? Then you can jump onto them and kind of ride them around a little, before slamming their head into a pointy part of the ship.
Problem solved? Not yet. For one thing, stunned enemies will have a countdown that ticks away until they’re back on their feet again. To get rid of them you need to pop their heads off – their heads are separate autonomous units – and get rid of the heads. Flush them down a toilet. Vent them into space. Chuck them into the trash. Aren’t – as Melville once said – aren’t there too many heads in the world?
Collect too many heads, though, and they’ll fill up your inventory, meaning you can’t carry as much pepper or as many bananas as you’d like. (Bananas, incidentally, are wildly OP in Skin Deep.) Drop a head briefly and it will make its way back to a respawn station and you’ll soon have that full-bodied raider moving around again.
This is Skin Deep at its best. You spend so much of your time up high on a railing or hidden in shadows, watching patrol routes and planning and reading the notes staff have left for one another, sounding them out for clues, but sooner or later you need to get stuck in, and when you do, things can go wrong. Maybe you slip on the banana peel you just placed for a guard. Maybe you knock them into a washing machine and you all slip up in the foam. Maybe you’ve broken something nearby and the glass gets stuck in your foot, Die Hard-style. Maybe – I did this yesterday – you wait behind a door ready to strike, but when the door opens, you don’t shoot them with your gun but instead press the wrong button and throw your gun directly at them. Sub-optimal.
This kind of thing makes the carefully pokey worlds of Skin Deep feel gigantic. Things can always go wrong, and one mistake can chain into another and another. And there’s simulation helping all this to reach its greatest extent. Creep through vents, sure, but watch the dust in the air, because you might sneeze. Bean someone with the radio they dropped and they’ll be out, but maybe you wanted that radio to phone in a fake all-clear call when the alarm goes off. Break a window and your enemies disappear into space, but maybe the wrench you’d been saving to smack people around goes with them.
Complicating all this further are puzzle elements that see you gradually unlocking each environment you move through. Vent systems, breakable windows, and things like trash shoots must all be unlocked, which means you need to steal tablets from raiders with security codes on, or find those codes written on notes somewhere. Coloured gates need coloured key cards to get through them – check lockers, or pinch them from baddies as they pass. Those cat key cards can be hard to find, but while you’re looking for them maybe you find something like a basketball – what could that be for? Maybe you work out how to use the restaurants’ fast food ordering system to your advantage, or you learn to lure enemies into position while you wait, doing the splits, high above them.
All of which is to say that Skin Deep’s individual levels are a riot, filled with clever elements for messing with your enemies but also filled with stuff that just makes the world of the game so much richer and more interesting. And in between these levels you return to your pod, answer emails from cats you’ve rescued, go through training scenarios, and piece together a huge central mystery. What makes it so special, I think, is that everything has had too much thought poured into it. Shotguns: you need to reload, but you also need to rack new shells in. Signalling the rescue pod when you’ve moved outside the ship and are ready to send your cats home? You need to lock onto a signal point and tap in a morse code prompt using the right trigger. Killed in a mission? You have one auto-defib, which moves the camera deep inside your body as your heart gets an extra kick and you fry everyone nearby – but maybe that kick also triggers any leaking gas that’s in the air so you bring yourself back from the bring only to find that you’re on fire.
All of this is of a piece with the rest of Blendo Games’ back catalogue: the exploding birds and the hectic chase from Gravity Bone, the airport departure board with a plane due for West Egg in Thirty Flights. We often talk of genre or mechanics, of series or influences. I’ve done all that today. But maybe we should talk more about voice. Lots of developers can do voices, but a handful have a voice. They have a voice that comes through in everything they do, regardless of genre or mechanics, series or influences. The voice is not down to character or story or dialogue, because the best games don’t work like that. The voice is there in everything, from tool-tip to pause screen to the stuff lying around a level and the way the developer handles corridors with blind corners. Skin Deep is an immersive sim. It riffs enthusiastically on everything from Die Hard to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it also has its own voice, and that’s coming through very clearly – often over a crackling radio line, as a raider chief checks in on their team-mates, most of whom have had their heads popped off and flushed down the toilet.
Review code for Skin Deep was provided by the publisher.
