Customarily, you’re supposed to wait until you’ve finished, or at least made significant progress with a game before you share your opinions about it. But even at my best, I’m still really bad at video games, and after a long stretch of not playing much of anything other than sims and turn-based strategy games, my already-unimpressive skills have atrophied.
Which all goes to say that I’m only barely into Blendo Games’s brilliant new Skin Deep. In fact, after struggling through a mission over several attempts and finally barely just making it through, the game showed me its opening credits sequence, making it clear that I’d been proud of myself for surviving through what was still the tutorial.
That’s bad, because I’m impatient and want to keep on discovering more of what the game has to show, since it seems to keep showing me new, weird things. And it’s also good, because I’d rather my experience with the game last as long as possible. I keep seeing people online giving their impressions after finishing the game (which has only been out a couple of days), and I kind of feel bad for them, because they’re done while I get to keep feeling like every story development is a monumental achievement on my part.
I haven’t even been to wonky space yet!
Anyway, Skin Deep is a game where you play as Nina Pasadena, an agent for an insurance company who’s tasked with infiltrating spaceships that have been captured by pirates, freeing the crew of cats who’ve been taken hostage, and then delivering everyone to safety. It’s a bit like Die Hard reimagined as a sci-fi slapstick comedy.
When you free one of the cat hostages, it leaps out of its cage as the word MEOW appears on screen in huge letters, with a drawn-out male voice saying “Meeeooow.” Because the overriding design ethos of the game is to be incessantly weird, funny, and delightful.
Skin Deep‘s narrative designer and writer, Laura Michet, wrote a great blog post about the team’s approach to comedy in the game, which I haven’t yet read in full because it contains spoilers. But it’s immensely gratifying to read an account of an entire team being so fully in sync when it comes to sense of humor and comedic sensibility, especially when you’ve seen how well it pays off.
Most of the games I’ve worked on have been comedic, but of the “battering the player senseless with jokes” variety, in the hopes that a good enough percentage of them will land. The highest achievement in that style of game, in my opinion, is when you manage to make the player an active participant in making the joke: when you can put all the pieces into place so that they get the setup, and then hand it over to them to deliver the punchline. Where you’re not just looking at the camera and saying, “Get it?!” but setting up a situation where the player has to get it before reaching the next step.
When it works, it’s sublime. And it feels like it’s the basis for the entirety of Skin Deep. It is relentlessly clever, but the core of your interaction with the game is taking a bunch of the components of physical comedy and then making them work together. Your only tools for fighting pirates are banana peels and bars of soap, empty cans of tuna or soda, copious boxes of pepper to make them sneeze, or a lighter paired with highly flammable deodorant or hand sanitizer. Your reward is popping the head off of a (still-living) pirate and tossing it in the trash, flushing it down a toilet, or throwing it out of an open airlock.
People who’ve played previous Blendo Games will recognize locations and characters from the entire catalog, most notably Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Flotilla. More than that, they’ll recognize what Christopher Donlan points out in his review for Eurogamer: a clear and confident voice. Skin Deep doesn’t just have all the signifiers that it belongs in the “Blendoverse,” but feels like the culmination of years of experiments in style and design and presentation, testing the limits of how games can remain fully interactive while telling stories that feel cinematic.
The tutorial has several of the jump cuts that defined Thirty Flights of Loving, which I honestly think work better in theory than in practice, and also dozens of clever ways to deliver exposition and advance the narrative. A speaking character will have a spotlight cast on him while the rest of the room goes dark. Images describing what he’s talking about will be projected on the walls and swirl around the room. A slideshow projector will fly into your room to deliver a holographic message. Tutorials are administered via Google Cardboard-style VR glasses. You’ll witness a significant plot point by navigating a zero-gravity shipwreck, and then be able to fly through a Bond movie-style credits sequence.
It’s all kind of breathtaking, how far it goes to deliver an experience without ever wrenching control away from the player. All while maintaining a tone that’s confidently goofy and silly without being corny, predictable, and meme-like. Instead of telling you a funny and imaginative story, it wants you to be an active participant in telling it.
Even if you’re really bad at telling it, like I am. And even there, the slapstick keeps it on the fun side of frustrating. As I’m trying to stealthily take down a pirate, only to end up jumping on his shoulders, bashing his head into a washing machine, slipping on the suds and falling to the ground, getting shot as I’m trying to stand back up, only to have the shock from my auto-defibrillator be what ultimately knocks out my target, I’m spending the whole time thinking not I am an all-powerful master assassin, but Okay but I have to admit that this is a pretty good gag.