Skin Deep review
Make space for this
"I. WANT. NINA. PASADENA. DEAD!" This is a distressing thing to hear from the mouth of a space pirate boss, much less see punching onto the screen in bold red text with every word. That's you, see - Nina Pasadena, deep freeze insurance commando. You eavesdrop on the angry rant early in this tightly packed immersive sim. You'll discover why the masked marauder hates you so much, but only after you spend a lot of levels crawling through vents, throwing pepper at guards, flushing their heads down toilets, and pulling glass shards from your bare feet. Skin Deep is a sci-fi caper of sudden and plentiful surprise, and it is dense with gags that land with the happy sting of a slap to the brain.
Some elevator pitches for Skin Deep:
- Die Hard in space but the hostages are cats.
- Heat Signature but it's a first-person shooter made in the same engine as Doom 3.
- Deus Ex but actually you did ask for this.
Each level sees Nina defrost aboard a ship that has been boarded by a pirate gang called the Numb Bunch. The crew - all cuboid cats with character - have been trapped in little purple boxes throughout the ship. It's up to you to find the keys needed to free them and call in an escape pod. After that, you'll have to deal with a pirate reinforcement brigade - either kill them all or find the one who holds the key to their getaway shuttle, take that key, and scarper.
It's the same goal every mission, so variety comes in how you go about de-pirating your vessel. Your freezer pod can hold no tools or weapons, so you've gotta go looking for any object that can be used as an improvised weapon. The bluntest example, in all senses of that word, is a conduit pipe ripped off the wall and used to club a guard upside the noggin. It's not pretty, and it's only vaguely effective (items have a "durability" count and will snap after a few bashes).
But there are other standard fighting procedures. Throwing a box of pepper or a rugwort plant at baddies will leave them dazed for a few seconds - long enough to pounce on their back and ride them like a terrible donkey into the nearest hand dryer or computer screen. Or you could lure your prey towards an airlock with a radio tuned to a jazz channel, then twist the safety valves and cause a room-wide depressurisation that slurps them into space. These are go-to tricks you learn fairly early, but later murders will include the use of ticking TNT, homing grenades, and other sillier weapons, all procured by scrounging around in lockers and following notes to hidden stashes.
Every item has a description label explaining how to use it, and to read the label you tap the shift key to zoom in comically and uncomfortably close. Nina is an excellent comedy action hero. She is basically walking around a spacecraft in her bare feet, picking up and squinting at bananas, cigarette lighters, soap, aerosol cans, TNT, and mumbling the written directions to herself. There's also a rare "duper" that can duplicate any of these objects. Leading to the simple solution of finding one cat key and duplicating it multiple times - at least until the duper runs out of juice. Or you could also, I don't know, duplicate another duper.
But my favourite tool is the walkie talkie. Get spotted in another stealth game and you'll often have to hide and wait out a countdown until everyone goes back to their posts, muttering about rats. Here, the alert keeps going until Nina puts on a gruff voice, opens a comms channel, and calls in the all-clear herself. Sometimes pirates will have a roll call over their radios, and if you've silently dispatched guards, this means trouble. An MIA pirate who doesn't respond will mean an alert goes up, releasing shipboard turrets and making pirates double cagey.
The solution? Use a walkie talkie to pretend to be each pirate you have killed. I once faked three "nothing to reports" but my walkie-talkie ran out of battery before I could report the fourth and final missing guard. I had to hoof it double-quick to the bridge to use the main comms microphone to pretend to be the last guy. "Everything's, uh, normal here!" growls Nina in the most unconvincing tone.
There are also a few guns - a semi-automatic rifle, a pump-action shotgun, and a headshotty pistol. But they jam often and come with little ammo. The pistol is the most handy, being a one-hit-kill insta-headshotter. But it only comes with one round in the chamber. After that, it's only good for throwing at your enemy's head in a blind panic.
They feel designed as intentional last-resorts, an act of desperation when facing down the tougher armoured foes. These are tankier goons who can't be pounced upon and aren't bothered by the vacuum of space. Dealing with them is often a case of improvised explosives. The cat rescue pod will also load you up on the heavier ordinance in preparation for those bigger boys. Tripwire grenades and TNT are the tools here.
Aside from all that, almost every level offers some singular toy or gimmick to make use of. A fast food ship has you generating burgers and burritos from a food machine to then pass through a hatch for random payments from drive-thru customers (this is the kind of universe in which consumers can pay for meatloaf with a loaded pistol). A library ship has book-detecting gates to prevent theft, and they'll shock you if you pass through holding a copy of "Firmware for Felines" or "My Haunted Abs". But those gates will also zap enemy guards if you lob a book through just as they step over the threshold.
There are mining lasers to misuse, mechs to hijack, horrible little "swordfish" drones that will impale you if you're not careful (but can be used against your foes with a hacking grenade). One ship contains a vault that requires two buttons to be pressed at the same time. The solution is fairly simple - or it would be, if there were not a guard circling the vault every few seconds. I thought I had things under control when I timed my steps and infiltrated this vault. Until the skull of another enemy I had tucked in my pockets started shouting muffled cries for help.
Yes. You have to carry around the decapitated heads of your enemies until you can find some way to flush them safely into space. If you don't, they'll slowly glide back to a regenerating station and get a new body. This puts all sorts of weird pressure on you as an evildoer dispatcher. Each skull takes up one of your precious five item spots, aside from being a mouthy liability. So you have to be on the lookout for airlocks or trash chutes to flush them out. Failing that, you can always smash a window.
That's if they're not locked up. A big chunk of time is spent looking for the codes to unlock the vents, airlocks, and windows. These codes are scribbled on sticky notes hidden around the place, or sometimes on pirate PDAs. It's a way to force Nina into certain corridors or to limit her options early in the level. The secret buttons or requirements to unlock many setpiece gimmicks are also usually discovered by reading logs and notes. I didn't mind this, but I can see it being one thing that might annoy those who hate to read even a single sentence in video games.
At least it's just a bit of reading. Blendo Games had Graham frowning in his Quadrilateral Cowboy review (their last game) because he felt the systems and toys handed to you weren't given sufficient space or time to fully blossom. You don't get the sense of a sandbox in those small, hacky levels, and the game was over fairly quickly. Here that feels like less of a problem. The levels are still small and confined (and the game is not particularly lengthy) but your assortment of gadgets becomes increasingly varied, and it feels more like a playground than Quad Cow.
Of course, even the most raucous jungle gym can only last so long. The quickest route to thinning pirate numbers is the least interesting (make them slip on a banana and bash their head on a sink). So if you do that a lot, it gets old fast. I felt compelled to go looking for more colourful opportunities. Slurping guys out a decompressing airlock or smashing a window remains as satisfying here as it is in Heat Signature or FTL. Especially when the camera freezes and a black-lined vignette effect frames the pirate ("Randy") as he sadly tumbles out into the void. But you may get far less out of repeating this manoeuvre than I do.
There are also quite a few bugs. One saw me warping into the floor of the ship and becoming trapped in the void between walls. I once suffered a rough crash when saving at a terminal. And there's plenty of glitchy enemy behaviour - getting stuck on the spot, becoming embedded in walls, patrolling in tight, pointless circles. But I will forgive any amount of bugs if a game makes me laugh. And Skin Deep does that a lot.
Doors open to reveal unexpected chuckles. Item labels are written with the succinct humour of a marketing copywriter who wants to be fired. I didn't think I could love a Blendo cat more than the silent arms dealer who sells you all manner of gadgets in Quadrilateral Cowboy, but there's a high-and-mighty mobster feline in this game called Little Lion who I would pledge allegience to in a jot. You are introduced to him in a 5-minute sequence that contains more laughs than the entirety of other comedy games.
Even outside of those giggling japes, there are endless smile-raisers. The inventive playfulness of Blendo is on full display. There's a James Bond styled opening song that you walk through as the credits roll. Exposition chats are accompanied by an old-fashioned projector that lights up the room with figures and diagrams. Finish a level and the game will sing "Niii-naaaaaaa!" in celebration. It's got so many little flourishes like this. Granted, I'm predisposed to love a Blendo Game, after the smash cuts of early free games like Thirty Flights Of Loving, and the hacker heisting of Cowboy. But if you haven't played anything from this studio before, Nina Pasadena's sci-fi jokeathon is certainly the place to start.