Back before I had a proper gaming PC or even a Steam account, I remember a friend at the time sending over some games that would run on my MacBook at the time. That was well over a decade ago, but I still remember the very first game I booted up from that batch. It was an oddball game called Thirty Flights of Loving by developer Blendo, a studio I’d never heard of. I was flabbergasted by its experimental structure and block-headed characters initially, but it stuck with me. Games come and go, falling into a memory hole to make more brain space for new ones, but you never forget a Blendo game.
Well over a decade later, I’m happy to see that Blendo is still making unforgettable games. Its latest is Skin Deep, which will launch on April 30 for PC. The project perked my ears when it was first announced three years ago, but I’ve been in the dark about what it actually is until now. Ahead of its release date reveal during today’s Annapurna Interactive Showcase, I tried its new Steam Next Fest demo out. I’m pleased to report that Skin Deep is already every bit as strange and alluring as the Blendo games that still stick with me today.
Flush the heads
Skin Deep is a first-person stealth action game (if I had to classify it) starring Nina Pasadena, a once great bounty hunter who now collects insurance debts. She finds herself back in action when her company’s ships are taken by space pirates. Now, she must use her particular set of skills to take out her enemies, pop their heads off, flush them down the toilet, and save a bunch of talking cats trapped in lockboxes.
Yep, it’s a Blendo game alright.
Let’s back up and start with the simple stuff. I get the basics down in a quick tutorial that teaches me how to navigate the ship and use my scanner to read fine print instructions on every item I can interact with. Soon enough, I learn how to pick up and store a handful of objects that I can swap between with my mouse wheel. I can pick up anything from books, to apple cores, to keycards. My best offense, at least in this brief demo, is my throwing arm rather than a gun.
After learning how to heal up and use a defibrillator to restart my heart when I die, I enter a bathroom where a pirate has his back turned to me. A package of black pepper sits on a countertop next to me. I grab it, aim with one mouse click, and toss it with the other. The poor guy is stunned, leaving me just enough time to pounce onto his back and direct him into objects around the room like soap dispensers. He’s not exactly dead once his health drops, though. When these pirates die, their heads pop off and sail back to a respawn point, rebuilding their bodies. To finish the job, I pop his head off, place it in a toilet, and send it off into the vacuum of space. I pull a keycard off his corpse and open a box to free a kitty crewmate, who I have a chat with after.
That all might sound weird, but Skin Deep is easier to understand than you’d expect. It’s essentially split up into a series of bite-sized rescue missions where I need to take care of pirates wandering around a few rooms, free the cats, and take an escape pod to safety. What makes that loop interesting is that Skin Deep is essentially a miniature immersive sim built around slapstick comedy.
In one room, I take a pirate out by throwing a banana in front of him. He slips on the peel, of course, and I wrestle him while he’s vulnerable before dumping his head in a trash chute. In another mission, I get on a pirate’s back and ram him into a glass window until it shatters, sending him into space (luckily, I have a protective suit and can freely fly outside). The encounters I played are short and only have me navigating a few rooms, but they aren’t linear set pieces that I’m meant to complete in one optimal way. Instead, I can crawl through vents to sneak my way through different parts of the ship, grab whatever items I can find, and use them to take out the wandering pirates any way I see fit. The ships are designed to be a death playground too, with fuel lines that can be ignited or ways to lure enemies into shock traps. It would be morbid if it all wasn’t rendered with Blendo’s signature blocky visuals.
I’ve only gotten a very small taste of what’s to come in Skin Deep, but I’m glad to see another delightfully eccentric game that gets creative with genre. It’s almost like Blendo is making its “mainstream” crossover game here, getting away from the hacking complexity of Quadrilateral Cowboy and bringing its style to a stealth action game. The end result is some indescribable crossover between Hotline Miami and Prey that’s filled with cats and pratfalls. Just as Thirty Flights of Loving still lives rent free in my head, I can already tell that Skin Deep is going to move into the condo next to it.
Skin Deep launches on April 30 for PC.
