Squidge, splodge, splat: Skin Deep doesn’t sound like most immersive sims. It doesn’t sound like most video games. Close your eyes and what it aurally resembles is a slapstick cartoon with a healthy dollop of toilet humor. These sounds, though, bookend chains of effects that are pure video game magic. Take the splodge, produced when you tamp down on the soap dispenser next to a sink, that in turn creates a cloud of flammable petroleum. Toss a lighter close to it and then you get a KABOOM.
In Skin Deep, you play as Nina Passedena, a secret operative for an intergalactic insurance company. Your job? To save cube-headed cats from a group of marauding space pirates called the Numb Bunch. Each mission plays out in taut, smartly designed spaceships, each just three or four rooms filled with a plethora of objects to play with, like banana skins (perfect for making guards fall flat on their asses) and black pepper (vital for making them sneeze). You sneak through vents (a lot of them) and skulk in the shadows. Should you take out a guard, you can dispose of their popped-off heads (because of a bizarre disembodying technology dubbed “Skull Saver”) by ejecting it from an airlock into the vast, lonely expanse of space.
If you’ve played a Blendo game, like Thirty Flights of Loving or Quadrilateral Cowboy,, then the tone of this spy caper will feel immediately familiar. It’s silly, eccentric, and brimming with knowing gags. The studio’s lead, Brendon Chung, has spent over 15 years honing a singular style that draws on classic Quake as much as art-house cinema. During Skin Deep’s introduction, Chung delivers a virtuoso synthesis of this vision: a blur of jump cuts between first-person action sequences through a faintly rickety vessel. There are exploded pipes and smashed glass, but wait! — you need to pick the glass out of your bare feet lest you bleed out.
Having to pick glass out of your feet might make it sound like Skin Deep is interested in realism. It’s not. What Chung and a small cohort of developers at Blendo hone in on are the possibilities afforded by a play space that is aiming for, even more than big-budget immersive sims like the Dishonored, a frankly preposterous level of physical and systemic coherence. They’re doing so using a video game engine, Id Tech 4 — famously used for Doom 3 — which is now more than 20 years old. The pleasure comes in testing the pliability of the design, the extent to which the game is able to account for harebrained schemes and foolhardy mistakes.
At one point, I lured a bunch of goons to a bathroom. I’d already duplicated a bar of soap (using the duplicator gun, naturally), which I then plopped on the floor. Upon entering the restroom, these hapless foes, dressed in lurid purple suits, slipped and slid all over until I eventually jumped on one of their backs, directing them in wibbling, wobbling fashion to smash into their nearby comrades and the surrounding faucets. By the end, the bathroom was a mess of spewing waters, fallen bodies, and mission-critical items like colored keycards.
There are other ways physicality manifests in Skin Deep. Guns, which arrive a handful of hours in, are modeled in exquisite detail; pop the clip to see how many bullets you have; cock the weapon after firing each round. Each animation is rendered with a satisfying, fidgety snap.
Yet sometimes, even against the most heavily armed enemies, you may not even need to use your firearm. On a fast-food spaceship, having evacuated my feline friends, a group of higher-level foes docked in a bid to try and take me out (such arrivals are always accompanied by a brilliant breakbeat version of sea shanty, “Wellerman”). I was struggling to evade them and ended up hiding in a vent that, unbeknownst to me, was connected to a huge walk-in freezer. There was a big button in the vent, and so when my adversaries walked in, I instinctively hit it. They froze, their heads popping off, leaving me a clear path to the escape pod. I hadn’t planned for this moment, merely stumbling into it. Blendo had engineered it.
Image: Blendo Games
Skin Deep has a habit of churning out serendipitous moments like this. For all the careful sneaking it encourages — and this is some of the finest free-form stealth since Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain — the game soars when your actions go awry. If spotted, the Numb Bunch are liable to unload bullets into you even if you’re standing in front of a window that looks out into the cosmos. Lo, the bullets shatter the window, throwing the entire contents of the room, including you and the idiot who fired the weapon, into zero gravity.
You can do the same, albeit in a more controlled manner, gliding gracefully around the outside of a ship in serene slow-mo before lining up a shot at a window, thus sucking your enemies into deep space. The options afforded by Chung’s sandbox design are supremely generous.
The fun is not quite inexhaustible. These ships, for all their distinguishing features (one is a post office; another is a mining vessel), and delightfully oceanic names (like the “Narwhal”), begin to blur as the hours stack up. Enemies, too, are a little uniform visually and not especially smart, following simple patrol paths, which you can easily skirt around. You will likely master these levels; it’s more a question of how much. The results board, which arrives at the end of each excursion, details your time and other key stats, suggesting the game has been partly designed with speedrunning in mind.
Because of the Id Tech 4 aesthetics and its evocation of foundational immersive sims like Thief, it’s possible to read Skin Deep as a throwback. But that sells the game short. The verve, personality, and breakneck pace of this stealth action feels supremely modern, like a manic hyper-pop reimagining of the classics — now with added sneeze mechanic.
Skin Deep launches on April 30th on PC.
