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I see my quarry across the laundry room: two armed guards ready to put this whole place on high alert if they see me. I slip behind the out-of-order soap dispenser and unscrew the back. There’s four bars of soap. Jackpot.
Along the first patrol route, I slide a bar of soap. He slips and falls. I climb onto his back and smash his head into the glass washing machine doors until he’s out cold. I decapitate him. The other guard sees it all and starts firing. I run at her poised to throw a can of black pepper—it’ll make her sneeze. But I forgot one thing: the soap. I slip and fall into my own trap. It seems like all is lost. But earlier, I dispensed some flammable hand sanitizer; in the chaos, a spark flies from the guard’s gun and ignites it. She immediately explodes.
That sort of chaos welled up every few minutes in Skin Deep, an open-ended, immersive sim-inspired FPS by Blendo Games, creators of Quadrilateral Cowboy and similarly offbeat games.
But while great imsims like Deus Ex and the recent Fallen Aces tend to focus on dynamic, high-octane gunfights and stealthy assassinations, Skin Deep drops the grit and embraces a more absurd sort of violence. While the game clearly has them, I never picked up a single gun in my time playing the game’s demo, getting most of my kills by tripping enemies up on banana peels, throwing empty tuna cans at them, and bashing their heads into the nearest soap dispenser. This is all running on a port of id Tech 4, the engine used for Doom 3 and the original Prey, but I assume this is what John Carmack really had in mind all those years ago.
When a fight breaks out, you have to successfully daze an enemy before they can be dispatched. You can just toss a bunch of space trash at them, but unless you have a good vantage point, you’ll just be gunned down. The environment is your friend, and it’s littered with objects that pack novel interactions with enemies or other objects.
You can scan an environment to highlight any interactables and read their fine print, describing whether they’re prone to exploding, sneeze-inducing, flammable, and so on. This particular mechanic immediately highlights the game’s appeal, transforming every mundane room into an arsenal of junk and cleaning materials.
This will all help incapacitate an enemy, after which point you climb onto their back and violently ram them into the environment until they die. Their heads are automatically scooped into a device called a Skullsaver, which enemies can use to revive their allies—assuming you don’t dump it into a trash compactor, throw it into space, or flush it down the toilet first.
There’s more up your own sleeves, though, if you’re completely unarmed. You can peer around corners to map a sneaky route, snap your fingers to attract enemies to a particular area, go prone and hide, and even cough blood on command when injured. I didn’t find a use for this, but it’s more expectorating than I get done in a traditional FPS. The game is pretty clear that you’re unarmored and barefoot, too, so watch your step for broken glass and be ready to pick bullets out of your flesh in a firefight. No one said insurance work was easy.
Yes, this is all about insurance. You play as Nina Pasadena, a secret operative acting on behalf of an intergalactic insurance company, saving cube-headed talking cats from space pirates. It’s all very grungy and eccentric, leaning as much on its derelict space cruisers as it does on visual gags and neon purple. The humor is never obnoxious, though, despite the over-the-top bent; a scene where a patrol of guards repeatedly walk into a wall of fire, respawn, and walk into it again during the tutorial, all the while remarking how late they’ll be to this whole space piracy thing, was pretty funny. Frankly, Nina Pasadena’s quips and feline friends are a nice break from the gruff, scowling, didn’t-ask-for-this of it all with protagonists like Adam Jensen and Garrett.
And given the average imsim’s penchant for ridiculous interactions, like Deus Ex’s LAM ladders or Prey’s mug transformations, Skin Deep’s cheeky, colorful style fits like a glove. When you’re saving secret agent cats in space, it’s hard to picture a combat solution so absurd that it’d feel out of place. I was glad I wasn’t able to shoot or sneak my way through the demo’s setpieces like I might in a similar FPS. It feels like a game where desperate improvised solutions are the meat and potatoes, and a calculated assault that goes exactly as intended should be a pleasant surprise.
In that regard, it seems to be on the right course to achieve that elusive imsim joie de vivre, where its systems are rich and consistent enough to turn a bite-sized FPS level into a chronically replayable playground. It doesn’t seem to have the sprawling ambitions of something like Gloomwood just yet, but that I had more fun throwing pepper in people’s faces than I might have had blasting them with a gun speaks volumes, and I’m eager to see how each new trick adds layers to the chaos.
The skeleton of a brilliant sandbox is on display in Skin Deep’s brief preview.
Of course, the demo only offers a taste. It’s difficult to judge how complex the web of shenanigans will get when the full game launches on April 30, but there’s a lot of little flourishes that stimulate the imagination. The two levels on offer are littered with notes hinting at alternative approaches to most objectives, and when you complete a mission, there are different challenges to complete which involve triggering interactions you might have missed.
The skeleton of a brilliant sandbox is on display in Skin Deep’s brief preview, so I’m fully champing at the bit to see what the final release is like—and what creative players are capable of once the full gamut of systems is available. Time will tell if it can match the novelty of its forerunners, but it’s off to a tantalizing start.
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Kurt Indovina
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