Skin Deep review: "A genuinely stellar immersive sim, replete with chaos"

If there is one word that can describe Skin Deep, the latest release from Blendo Games, it is 'stylish'. I almost want there to be shimmering WordArt in this review, just for that word, since seeing it so plainly in black and white doesn't begin to sell how whimsical, stylish, and fun this is. In terms of the more standard categorizations of games, Skin Deep is an immersive sim, and an immersive sim par excellence, but it's a comedy too, and genuinely funny.

You are Nina Pasadena, an Insurance Commando and former criminal. In essence, you are cryogenically frozen and then hidden on spaceships as they go about their business. If pirates attack, it's up to you to eliminate them and free the ship's crew. Also, the crew are all cats. You will encounter many felines over your time in Skin Deep, including the chef Tornado, scuba diver Casiano, and the rancher Dusty. Once you've met these cats, they'll often email you in between missions, feeding you tidbits of information about their lives and dreams.

Ships that you are embarked on have a particular piracy problem. The pirate group known as the Numb Bunch wants you dead, and specifically targets ships that you're aboard. It's up to you to figure out why. I won't go any deeper into the story than that to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say the pirate leader has a bone to pick with you.

The missions themselves are consistently fantastic. The ships have vents to crawl through, trash chutes that can flush you into space, airlocks, and eminently breakable windows. Often, these will be locked until you find a code, but finding these is far from onerous. Your eyes are equipped with a zoom function that's less of a standard zoom and more of a CSI-inflected "enhance!" button, allowing you to read notes from clear across a room. Notes are stored in your memory palace, accessible by holding tab. After the notepad jamboree that was Blue Prince, it was a welcome break.

Ships of Fools

Exploration of the ships isn't limited to their interior either: getting chucked out into space doesn't cue a frantic race back inside for oxygen. Thanks to Nina's third lung, she can survive in the vacuum in nothing but her overalls.

This leads to some fantastically open levels where, for instance, if a door is barricaded and you don't have the requisite keycard to open it, you can simply pop outside, float around to that room, then smash the window to gain access. Special mention should be given to the fact that the ships are wildly different from one another: one is a floating wind power plant (just go with it), another an icebreaker (just go with it again), and yet another a floating fast food restaurant, complete with a drive-through window that you can man yourself (yeah, I don't know either).

Each ship has a set of secondary objectives. One is always, as far as I can tell, to find a hidden cassette tape like we're playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but others include being tasked with repairing a mech to use against your enemies, or opening a weapons cache with a mining laser. The former, in particular, gave me Shogo: Mobile Armor Division flashbacks, as I stomped around the cargo bay annihilating the elites that had forcefully shoved me off this mortal coil multiple times in the last half hour.

In between missions, you'll occasionally do interstitial sequences such as visiting Little Lion, your former friend and contact in the criminal underworld, or infiltrating a space pirate convention. It's goofy and allows for a nice break after some hair-raising escapes. The latter, in particular, made me laugh out loud multiple times – I spent a great deal of time perusing the convention's various stands, advertising various inventions like a jammer keypad that was the size of an SUV.

The pirates, too, are very entertaining. There are many ways to approach them: you could become a ghost in the machine and simply pickpocket their Cat Keys, allowing you to free their purring prisoners. You can stealthily take out the standard pirates by bashing open a window or making an airlock explosively decompress. You could also, if you prefer, throw pepper at them, stunning them, then pounce on their back before slamming them into various stations and consoles around the ship like they're giving you the world's deadliest piggyback ride.

If you do decide to take them on, you'll need to eject their heads from their bodies afterwards. They're equipped with devices called Skullsavers, which can sustain their heads, allowing them to float to regeneration pads and regrow their body before reentering the fray. Ejecting their heads gives you their Skullsaver, which you can then flush out of an airlock, a trash chute, or indeed, a toilet. The Skullsavers talk to you throughout, sometimes threateningly, sometimes pleadingly, but they're all going on the same grim journey. If you keep the Skullsaver in your inventory but don't have it equipped, you'll still hear their muffled protestations, which is a nice touch.

Enemy variety is gradually increased over the course of the game – you can expect to fight the standard pirates on every level, but they'll gradually be joined by other units including engineers, who can lay landmines, and elites, who provide much stiffer resistance. Honestly, a little too stiff. This isn't a game where you'll have a gun most of the time, and you can't kill elites by breaking windows or opening airlocks, so taking them down is annoyingly tough at times. Their health pool is more than double that of the standard space pirates, and they can't be pounced upon, either. They're an annoying little speed bump that interrupts the game's otherwise impressive flow.

Fuel for the imsim fire

As an imsim, you'd expect the game to give you a huge variety of toys to play with, and you won't be disappointed. Items range from the mundane (mugs) to the sci-fi (the duper, allowing you to make a copy of most physical objects, including the all important Cat Keys).

Many of the items serve secondary purposes, some of which I hadn't discovered until the game's last few levels. For example, the pirate walkie-talkie, which you use to call off alerts, can be smashed against a wall. This makes it spark: create a leak in a fuel line, wait for a pirate to investigate, and then chuck the sparking walkie-talkie, resulting in a quick demonstration of chemistry and thermodynamics, as well as a quick freeze, with the walkie-talkie and the flammable gas annotated to demonstrate exactly what you've done.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of item interactivity inherent in Skin Deep: you can use soap and banana peels to trip up and stun pirates, make flammable clouds with deodorant, and distract enemies with cat toys. My favorite combination of tools was the humble lighter and various flammable objects, which I used to have many a pirate BBQ.

To make it plain how chaotic and joyous a lot of the combat can be, let me tell you about the time I defeated pirate reinforcements on a space radio station. After finding notes stating that playing music in the DJ Booth was deafening everyone on the ship, I dug out an old electronica reel and loaded it up. With music blasting throughout the ship, no one could hear me. I laid an ambush in the drive room staircase, trapping them with a grenade. In the ensuing chaos, I took out two of the trio, with one being taken out by a rocket from his comrade, before making my escape. It's that kind of game.

Another feature that gets titrated into the game is having to call in a rescue pod for the cats. To do this, you need a signal lamp, which you'll aim at a beacon and flash SOS. This summons the pod, into which you deposit the cats before retrieving some weapons from inside it to fight a wave of pirate reinforcements. I use shotguns, rifles (that look like Sten guns, fact fans), and a curiously lethal thing called an Autopistol to take out my enemies. Honestly, guns are perhaps the least interesting part of combat – they feel fine, and are pleasingly silly, but after using deodorant and sparking electronics to MacGyver my way across the ship, they just tend to feel a little dull.

Getting into out-and-out combat isn't something that I'd tend to encourage either, at least without laying an ambush first. You're very fragile – if you die, an automatic defibrillator will jumpstart your heart and stun nearby enemies, but if you die after that, you're done. Due to the general chaos in Skin Deep, you'll probably find yourself kicking the bucket a reasonable amount, and it's here that probably the most frustrating element of the game rears its head.

You can save during missions at various terminals, but the game only autosaves at the start of each mission. If you die and haven't saved, then you're cooked. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the game didn't crash when saving fairly regularly. Trying to load this save would then just give me a console readout displaying information about the crash, forcing me to start the whole level again. Each one only takes about 20-30 minutes to complete on average, but it's still extremely annoying.

Back to the Future-past

As you might have surmised from having to use a signal lamp and Morse code to summon a rescue pod, the game is solidly retrofuturistic. At times, it feels like I was playing a game set in the Red Dwarf universe, all '80s (and older) electronics juxtaposed against futuristic space travel. Other times, it felt like No One Lives Forever, with Nina's one-liners being such a great throwback.

The music, too, is a real joy. The ship that carries pirate reinforcements blasts out a synthesized version of the Wellerman sea shanty, the game's title drop is accompanied by a full Bond-style intro sequence, and a stakeout mission is accompanied by slinky Pink Panther-esque jazz, tipping the scales even more into retrofuturism. Even the title itself sounds like a film from the 1960s.

Despite the bugs and the paucity of autosaves, I do strongly recommend Skin Deep. The frustration that I felt after each crash was certainly intense, but these bugs will be ironed out given enough time. The game itself is beautifully imaginative, fun, chaotic, and, once again, stylish in the extreme. Get in the cryo-pod, it's time to fight some space pirates.

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