Maybe you should have stayed home.
Most of us have been to a bad party or two where nothing quite feels right. No-Skin, a recently-released minimalist horror roguelike, shows you what it’s like when the night’s vibes are cataclysmically rancid. The souring conversation with your friends seems like a minor concern, at least, compared to being accosted by an angry, faceless, skinless man while looking for the fridge. That’s just the start of a deeply cursed evening. At least the moon is smiling upon me, and gives me a knife and a gun. Thank you, moon.
No-Skin is one of the simplest roguelikes I’ve played. I pick from one of three locations in the building to stumble into in an intoxicated haze, each stating a percentage chance of finding something good, something mystifying, or ending up in a fight. Once in a fight, I take turns to attack with a knife or gun, use items I’ve collected, or just try to skew the (almost always stated) odds in my favour. Sometimes the moon blesses me. Sometimes the No-Skin man’s curse worsens. Sometimes I’ll meet a fish walking on long gills that wants to trade some items, or something stranger still.
As the night drags on, I get the option to wander further out into the apartment complex. I can talk with my friends in between stabbing or shooting them. I can ask them for things, even in the middle of battles. But as the actions available to choose from become more lucid, the world gets more abstract. My friends become increasingly warped and dangerous. The rooms become more surreal. The curse grows stronger. Everything becomes more sickly and I become increasingly reliant on cigarettes to get out of fights, on drugs to keep me going, and on increasingly tenuous luck.
It might be a simple game, but from what I’ve played, that works in No-Skin’s favor. I weigh up the odds, you make my choices and roll the dice. If I don’t make it, I can spend currency at the end of a run to unlock more characters, more events, more items. Chances to skew the odds a little further in my favour next time, or just investigate esoteric new plot threads. The simplicity means I don’t have to dedicate too much mental energy to the math, and can just stew in the horrible, queasy atmosphere.
This game does a lot with very little. A fascinating interplay between the mundane and the nightmarish. Asking a pal for a smoke before shooting them in the face, then seeing them again in the next room. Evocative static sprites against low-fi photos-sourced backdrops. Brooding, unsettling ambient droning in the background. Sharp writing heavy with both eldritch weirdness and unsettling feelings about both the protagonist, their relationships to their friends and their interactions with both the people and monsters at the party. Although, the game seems loath to draw much differentiation between the two.
My first few unsuccessful runs through the game left me comfortable, anxious and tense, but it has its hooks into me. I need to dig deeper, and see just what moon-touched mysteries lie at the bottom of it all.
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