I’m floating in space, clinging to the hull of a spaceship. I peer in through a trash chute – not the most glamorous window into the ship’s vacuum-sealed world, but it will have to do. Inside, a lone guard patrols around a laundry room. Perfect, she’ll make for an easy ambush. I wait for her to turn her back, and then I burst in. Immediately, everything goes awry. Because I entered through the trash chute, I’m now stinky, and the guard snaps to attention as soon as she catches a whiff. I frantically scurry under a counter, where I happen upon a hidden stash of soap. Fantastic. I can work with this.
I throw a couple bars onto the ground, producing sudsy bubbles and causing the guard to slip and fall. I rush out to finish her off, only to… also faceplant as a result of my self-made slip ‘n’ slide. The guard opens fire, and I roll into a nearby vent with just a sliver of health left. OK, I think, this isn’t going great, but I still have options. As I linger in the vent, a meter fills telling me that I will soon sneeze – not great for stealth – but that gives me an idea. Earlier I picked up a container full of black pepper; I barge back into the laundry room, take aim, and throw it at the guard, who begins sneezing and wheezing. It’s now or never. I leap onto her back and wrestle her onto one washing machine, followed by another. That leaves her down for the count. Then, of course, I pop her head off nice and clean and throw it out the airlock. You know, so she can’t levitate over to a new body. Another job well done.
This is Skin Deep in a nutshell.
Skin Deep first appeared on my radar almost as soon as it was announced several years ago, largely because I’ve been a fan of developer Blendo Games since the hazily-remembered days of Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights Of Loving, games that told tight, absurd stories with a uniquely cinematic flair for the dramatic. But on other occasions, such as 2016’s Quadrilateral Cowboy, the studio revealed its true passion: densely-packed mechanical systems, the kind that fit together like gears in a pocketwatch. Skin Deep, which comes out in April, applies pretty much every tool in Blendo’s belt to a sci-fi immersive sim. It makes a phenomenal first impression.
Skin Deep, a brief demo of which is now available as part of Steam Next Fest, describes itself as an “immersive first-person shooter” in which you play as an insurance operative who rescues talking cats. (When you do so, by the way, they explode out of their tiny jail cells, and the word “MEOW” flies across the screen.) You’re outnumbered and outgunned aboard nonlinear spaceships, with standout features that include the aforementioned sneezing tendency, as well as the fact that your character is constantly barefoot for some reason.
The setup might sound silly, but it works. For example, if you step on broken glass, it gets lodged in your foot. Yikes. But if you yank it out, you can both recover some health and gain a new weapon. This kind of thinking suffuses the whole experience: Even the most mundane objects can be potent offensive tools in the right hands (or feet). I’m talking books, hunks of metal, walkie talkies, tuna cans, and slapstick classics like banana peels and fishbones. Creativity is your paintbrush. Every level is a canvas.
At this point, I’ve replayed the second level several times, with a devious glee that takes me back to childhood afternoons spent with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo that came bundled with Zone of the Enders. There are just so many ways to mess with these three hapless guards, and they’re all funny. Certainly, I’ll always remember my nearly-botched first attempt, but my second go ‘round – when I realized I could use books and coffee cups to shatter numerous windows and turn most of the ship into an antigravity playground – represented a true turning of the tables, a new power dynamic born of ingenuity (and my character’s thus-far-unexplained ability to breathe in outer space).
After only an hour or so, which includes replays, I’m extremely high on Skin Deep. It feels like one of those games that’s going to keep throwing comically ingenious (or perhaps ingeniously comical) curveballs at me as levels increase in complexity, and whatever comes next will be positioned atop a uniquely confident foundation. As it stands, games already have plenty of slick infiltrations and assassinations. They need more knock-down, drag-out cartoon brawls. They need more slapstick. Skin Deep’s demo gets it. I sure hope the full game does too.
