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Behind the scenes at GamesRadar+, we have a pretty affectionate relationship with the term "sicko." If you've spent any time in online communities, you've probably seen the faux-political comic from The Onion with the guy in the shirt marked "sickos" proclaiming "yes… ha ha ha… yes!" In meme form, this sicko is usually obsessed with some innocuous special interest that sits outside the mainstream. Among the GamesRadar+ staff, we have our retro gaming sickos, our strategy sickos, and even a fair few cozy gaming sickos – people whose knowledge and passion for a given genre go far beyond the average gamer's.
"Someone described our game as being an immersive sim for sickos," Skin Deep designer Brendon Chung tells me, and I immediately know exactly what he means. "I really thought that was very funny, because I'm glad it found this audience of people who want a first-person game that has interactions that you don't often see, and is playful. We're really glad it found its peoples."
The tenets of the immersive sim have always been a bit hard to define. They're usually first-person (but not always), and they're usually focused on stealth (but not always). Semi-modern classics like BioShock, Dishonored, and the later Deus Ex games probably best define the format for today's players. You have a set of tools and are dropped into an intricately designed level with a multitude of pathways to achieving your end goal. It can feel as if a game designer is handing you the keys to their work and simply saying, "Here you go. Go wild."
Die Hard in space
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Skin Deep has the distilled essence of the immersive sim flowing through its veins. You, as the impeccably named insurance commando Nina Pasadena (a leftover moniker from an old film school project, Chung says), take on space bandits with little more than a John McClane-style can-do attitude. Toss a can of hairspray at an enemy and they'll be engulfed in a cloud of flammable gas, which you can ignite to explosive effect by throwing a lighter in after it – but you risk destroying essential equipment in the resulting blast.
Maybe this is the best way to sum up the gnarly appeal: if you step through broken glass, the shards will get embedded in Nina's poor, bare feet. Another Die Hard callback, yes, but John McClane never thought to pull out one of those shards to use as a shiv against the bad guys, an option which Skin Deep offers to you.
Chung says Die Hard "absolutely" was a direct inspiration for Skin Deep, because the concept of an underequipped lone hero fighting a well-armed group of bad guys is "so juicy" for a video game. "One thing we really wanted to explore was the idea that John McClane is just a guy, and he gets pretty messed up during the movie," Chung explains. "It was fun, for Skin Deep, to [be like], 'Oh, how can we explore ways for the player to be affected by the world?' You're not just like some walking pile of guns that just shoots down everything, you are this fragile bag of meat."
Banana peels
Chung also cites an absolute who's who of sickos games as further inspiration. There's Far Cry 2, a 2008 systemic playground of an FPS famous for out-of-control fires and grenades rolling down hills. There's Mark of the Ninja, an outstanding 2012 indie stealth game from the eventual Don't Starve devs that gives you all the tools you need to be a master ninja. Finally, there's No One Lives Forever, a cult classic duology of stealth-FPS hybrids that parody '60s-era spy thrillers. Skin Deep is "kind of a mashup of all these things and Die Hard," Chung says.
The comedy influence of No One Lives Forever is especially notable in this genre, since many immersive sims are set in deadly serious worlds – which, of course, you immediately undercut by repeatedly forcing guards to endure the most slapstick humiliations. Skin Deep has a much more explicit comedy bend, with goofball one-liners from Nina, an extended cast made up mostly of talking cats, and even a few literal banana peels to make your opponents slip on, which makes the slapstick inherent to immersive sims feel a lot more natural.
"I think everything that we make steers gently in that direction," Chung explains when I ask about Skin Deep's comedy focus. "A lot of credit goes to Laura Michet, our narrative director, who wrote the entire game and came up with the entire story, and made the humor approach work for the game. I think something that we really value is when games run the spectrum of emotions. I think there's something special about kind of ping-ponging between something that makes you laugh, something that makes you scared, something that's kind of spooky or melancholy or sad. I think that when you have that full breadth of feelings, it kind of makes it feel like a full meal instead of a snack. That's something we always try to do in the work that we make."
"The story of every game"
Skin Deep has roots going back to some of Chung's earliest work, like the experimental narrative game Gravity Bone, which was essentially a Quake 2 mod. Chung is still using a version of the increasingly creaky id Tech engine to this day, even on games like Skin Deep, and it helps give the Blendo Games catalog a very distinct old-school flavor.
"I love it," Chung says of id Tech. "I got my start doing games as a hobby, doing mods in high school for Quake and Doom and things like that. So for me, it's just like I found a piece of tech that I really loved, and have been using – oh gosh – since the mid-'90s. It's tech that's built just for first-person games, so it's just laser-focused to do this one thing really well, and the tools are made to just do first-person levels. I think there's something nice about just finding a hot rod that does this one thing extremely well and just sticking with it."
Still, Skin Deep was clearly a challenge to build – there's a seven-year gap between the launch of Flotilla 2, Blendo's previous title, and Skin Deep, and it seems the genre itself is partly to blame. "A thing about a lot of interviews that I've read about other immersive sim developers is that the game kind of came together in the last few months," Chung says. "I was thinking like, 'Oh, I wonder if that's gonna happen.'"
As it turns out – yeah, it happened, but seeing a game start to come together only after a half-decade of development has got to be nerve-racking. "You just need so many different pieces to connect together and be in the game and to all coexist at the same time before the game actually works, and is interesting," Chung explains. "For a lot of our playtesting, we were watching players kind of fumble around, get stuck, and not quite have all the pieces that they need. But it wasn't until the very last leg of development where it's like, 'OK, the game's actually working. We didn't waste all of our time. I think this thing ended up working out.'"
But that feeling isn't unique to immersive sims, Chung says. "I think it's the story of every game," he notes, "that you just kind of play this broken build for the entire development phase, and then it starts to not be broken. But for immersive sims, there's so many pieces that are dependent on each other, and so it is kind of scary that, like, 'Oh God, this isn't gonna work. This is getting kind of down to the wire.' We're really happy how it turned out."
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