Skin Deep review: wacky immersive sim could have used more chaos

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How is a person expected to do a job with no resources? That’s the question that intergalactic insurance agent Nina Pasadena comes up against in Skin Deep, a miniature immersive sim from Blendo. Pasadena is tasked with protecting spaceships full of cats from pirates, but her corporate overlords haven’t given her much to work with. Banana peels, boxes of black pepper, and soap all become improvisational weapons because there’s not much else to work with. Can’t a girl at least get a gun?

While that premise makes for a fun slapstick comedy about getting the job done against all odds, Skin Deep itself feels like an ambitious go-getter working with limited resources. Blendo’s charming project is full of ingenious immersive sim hooks that boil the genre down to its essence, but it struggles to build on that idea enough to make each of its spaceships feel like distinct challenges. It gets enough cartoon mischief out of its deadly premise, though, giving it enough flair to earn it an Employee of the Week plaque.

Lo-fi thriller

In Skin Deep, players carry out jobs for MIAOCorp, an intergalactic insurance agency run by blocky cats. In order to protect the cargo and crew of its ships, it hides cryogenically frozen agents on board who are deployed in the event of a pirate takeover. Nina is one of those agents, who has to pop the heads off of unsuspecting raiders, flush them down the toilet to make sure a lifesaving machine can’t reconstruct their bodies, and free a crew of cats who are trapped in locked boxes on board. That day job is interrupted when Nina discovers that she has an evil doppelganger, kicking off a wacky spy thriller between gigs.

It’s all completely absurd in a way that fits Blendo’s signature style. Since 2008, the indie developer has been one of gaming’s secret weapons. It’s a master of its oddly specific craft, fusing lo-fi visuals with thrilling spy stories to create a comedic style all its own. Skin Deep very much builds on the strengths of both Thirty Flights of Loving and Quadrilateral Cowboy, keeping everything that made those games memorable intact while expanding out the studio’s gameplay ambitions.

For newcomers just discovering the studio through a high-profile Annapurna Interactive publishing deal, Skin Deep’s aesthetic might be a culture shock at first glance. It’s full of proudly polygonal objects, flat textures, and block headed characters. These have always been Blendo’s calling card, but it especially works in a game that feels indebted to foundational PC shooters like System Shock. Skin Deep carries the heart of a classic immersive sim, wearing its influences on its sleeve. That’s combined with its own visual signatures, as it opts for brightly colored ship corridors that lighten the mood of those old PC games and reimagines what they’d look like as comedies.

Don’t mistake that intentional friction for low production value, though; Skin Deep still goes all out to fully realize Blendo’s long-held cinematic ambitions. It has its own James Bond opening, complete with an original theme. It sports a great cast of voice actors featuring highlights like SungWon Cho, who has a blast voicing a stentorian business cat. Its best moments unfold in interstitial story sequences, like one where Nina has to break into a pirate meeting and plant a bug on a sandwich on a seemingly never ending tray of them. Blendo scales up in all the right places to nail the comedy comedy thriller approach it has been chipping away at for well over a decade without Annapurna’s backing, but it doesn’t forfeit its oddball energy in the process.

Though that’s impressive, there are still spots where Blendo’s limitations get in the way of a bigger and more complicated idea. I ran into several bugs during my testing which ranged in severity. Some were harmless enough, like when a pirate’s corpse got stuck in a wall and I had to wait around for his inaccessible head to eject from his body. Others were so severe that I had to start missions from scratch, like when I rammed a pirate into a corner and we both got sent through the geometry of the ship. Scary error messages would trigger when I’d try to enter a new mission or save using an in-mission touchscreen. Unsightly issues like that left me scared to experiment with the sandbox, as it always felt like I was toying with a fragile game that would come apart at the seams if I put too much pressure on it.

Micro immersive sim

The bugs are fixable, but they speak to a wider problem here that’s harder to solve. Skin Deep is anchored by a promising immersive sim hook that it can’t fully support. The core idea is that each mission tosses Nina into a spaceship, composed of a few interconnected rooms, and tasks her with freeing all cats onboard. To do that, she needs to sneak around guards, find keys, and exit the ship as quietly as possible. She doesn’t have any weapons when she exits her cryopod, so she has to be resourceful to get through a job in one piece.

Early on, that flow is a delight to discover. I quickly learn that everyday items can become deadly weapons that help me take out guards if I don’t simply want to sneak past them. If I toss a box of black pepper at someone, it’ll stun them and give me enough time to jump on their back, ramming them into sinks and screens. The more I experiment, the more I learn to get those most out of common items. An unassuming soap dispenser isn’t just a way to clean myself off when I’ve jumped into a trash chute and now carry a stench that guards can smell. I can also squirt some flammable cleaning mist from it into the air and toss a lighter at it to cause an explosion. Interactions like that cause emergent moments of chaos that can blow an entire room of pirates sky high by accident.

Blendo’s knack for invention goes a long way towards realizing its slapstick vision. To kill an enemy, I need to pop their head off and then dispose of it so it can’t float back to a respawn device. I can either do that by flushing it down a toilet, throwing it down the trash, or sending it into the vacuum of space. I discover that I have a few creative ways to approach that last one, which is the most satisfying option of the three. Depressurizing an airlock door is a sinister way to get there, but I’m especially a fan of tossing a mug at a cockpit window to break the glass and suck everything out. Other systems are similarly playful, giving me a lot of little nuances to remain aware of. If I crawl in a vent for too long, I’ll build up a sneeze that alerts guards to my presence. Once they know I’m there, they’ll perform a vent purge that will kill me if I’m still inside. I always have to stay creative and keep moving to finish my job.

While I find a lot of great pieces like that early on, they slow to a halt after a few jobs. Skin Deep only introduces a new idea here or there as missions progress, which means that my options are more limited than they appear initially. Structural repetition sets in when I realize that I’ll need to unlock the airlocks or vents in each level, requiring me to hunt down a four letter code cleverly hidden somewhere in the ship. Though there’s a lot of items I can pick up, not all of them have a unique use, so I find myself tossing banana peels and slippery soap fairly often to solve a problem. Every ship is fairly similar, with cameras to avoid and barred doors to unlock with colored keycards. There are only a small handful of creative challenges to solve, like one ship that hides a cat in a locked vault that I can either crack by easing the security system or blow the door sky high with TNT. There’s enough here to support a compact game with a few great missions, but it’s stretched thin over a 10 hour campaign.

That’s the challenge of the immersive sim genre; creating a great one is a tough job. It’s not just about stitching together a web of strong systems that come together to form emergent moments of bliss. You’re also creating hundreds upon hundreds of little puzzles that feel like they can be solved in a multitude of creative ways. This is what IO Interactive’s Hitman trilogy does so well. There are plenty of ways to assassinate a target using the tools available in the sandbox, but there are a few unique possibilities tied to each kill. It’s a joy when you organically figure out how to take a guy out with an exploding golf ball. It feels like cracking a (very morbid) puzzle with a surprising answer. Skin Deep has great systems, but it’s short on great solutions.

All of this comes back to Skin Deep’s scope, which is perhaps too small and too big at the same time. It’s a micro immersive sim with much grander ambitions that it can’t fully deliver on. It’s like encouraging an employee to do better work, but then docking their pay and taking their company computer back. There’s only so much you can do with so little. Skin Deep is resourceful enough to stretch the systems it has into a delightfully wacky slice of slapstick, but an idea this good deserves a raise. Let’s call it a “Meets Expectations” job review.

Skin Deep was tested on PC and Steam Deck OLED.