Skate Story review: "A beautiful and unique skateboarding game with great, stylized visuals set in a grungy underworld"

If ever you needed an example for the 'games as art' debate, look no further. As a creation, Sam Eng's startling Skate Story is a monumental achievement. As a skateboarding game it's fundamentally solid but less convincing. As an entertainment product? It's hard to say exactly who it's for… but it's definitely not for everyone.

This is a story-led skateboarding game which sees you take control of a skateboarder 'made of glass and pain', seeking to eat the moons lighting the sky of the underworld. No typos there, you really are trying to eat moons. The idea goes that each moon in your stomach weighs you down into the next layer of the underworld, until you can meet the devil himself and reclaim your soul.

You could be forgiven for asking how skateboarding fits in with any of that. Skateboarding is what you do the most, certainly, but it's a bit like Sayonara Wild Hearts in that the means of locomotion is almost incidental as it's the aesthetic whole that you're enjoying, not necessarily the nuts and bolts gameplay. But this isn't the place for ambiguity, so with most of the game spent on four wheels, let's imagine it's a normal skateboarding game for a moment and see how it holds up.

Shall I carve?

To begin with, control feels way too loose as you careen through narrow hallways trying not to shatter into a hundred pieces by colliding with too many obstacles along the way. The camera is low and offset, making it tricky to aim for grind rails and the like, though by the time you finish the game, you'll be pretty adept at hitting everything you intend to. It's more about instinct than precision.

It doesn't play like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, instead being a surprisingly realistic simulation. It's less fiddly than the original Skate, allowing you even to land sideways, and it's far more constrained and funneled than Skate 4. The game does a great job of teaching you, trick by trick, drip-feeding complexity pretty damn perfectly until you're nollieing, reverting, and chaining your moves with pleasing fluidity.

There's an excellent combo completion 'stomp' feature where you just have to ollie then hit Square to finish your combo and bank your score. This also doubles up as an attack, draining a proportional amount of enemy health. Add in some timers and occasional command strings to follow and you've got a decent skateboarding game that rewards combos with progression rather than high scores.

At the same time, it isn't a skateboarding game at all. It's an interactive story that takes in weird and wonderful characters like a sort of talking pillow, a rabbit that purrs, and more that I won't spoil. By the end, some feel like friends, though it's all so surreal you won't know who or what to trust. Story scenes feel deliberately janky, and no characters are voiced, which is at odds with the rest of the high quality presentation.

Another prism system

Your skateboarder's prismatic appearance is beautiful, reflecting and refracting the environments before shattering with convincing physics when you crash. The underworld itself shifts and moves, with translucent images moving across the screen in opposition to your own turning. Text jitters like it's a third generation VHS copy, complete with color bleed, and even the 3D visuals wobble if you look closely enough.

This presents a problem. No matter how much I adjusted the fish eye lens, pulled the camera out and turned off camera shake and 'handheld' effect, the game made me feel unwell. Over the past 35+ years of gaming, only a handful of games have given me motion sickness, but this has clear and definite physiological effects on me. I had to stop playing on my usual 55-inch screen and switch to a smaller monitor after just 15 minutes. I was able to finish the last half of the game on a 27-inch 4K screen, but that was in short bursts. Be warned, the movement and flashing imagery is definitely worthy of the warning at the start. Thankfully, I was able to finish the game, which took some 5 hours in total. Not massively long, but even then the ending feels needlessly protracted as it meanders past the logical ending, adding in a few pretty clever moments but not concluding particularly brilliantly.

Some commenters are approaching Skate Story as an interactive music album, but that's not really how it's presented. Earlier I mentioned Sayonara Wild Hearts, and while the music by Blood Culture is strong, there's never a moment here that matches or surpasses the immaculate 'Begin Again' in Simogo's game. The action here doesn't sync with the music, though specific music is queued to hit key moments. It's clearly very good, but it's not quite great, at least not compared to gaming's finest. Definitely worthy of being mentioned in the same breath, at least.

There's plenty of thesaurus-baiting dialogue that's punctuated with moments of daftness and a few pop culture references too. TV conventions are toyed with, gaming tropes borrowed then abandoned, yet the fragmented level design actually provides pleasingly concise, bite-sized challenges with well-placed level furniture. If anything the gameplay's strengths are underplayed and could have been expanded greatly, but then that would have detracted from the story. And it is called 'Skate Story'.

While it runs perfectly on PS5, the glass skater fell through the floor on several occasions, and the collision detection actually failed in the very last scene, which was disappointing. Replaying whole levels after missing a portal by 3 seconds is annoying, and there are a few moments where you might be unsure what to do next, though there's usually the ability to hit right on the d-pad and get a navigational hint.

Skate Story is a fine work of art. It's also a good skateboarding game, but one that's subsumed by heavy screen filters and the wild storyline. Provided it doesn't make you feel unwell, there's a few hours of well-crafted, entertainment-as-art here that you certainly won't forget in a hurry.

Ignore the haters, Skate might have finally found the perfect formula for a skateboarding game in 2025