Skin Deep Review - System Snark
The immersive sim is arguably gaming’s worst-named genre, as it really doesn’t tell you much. Aren’t most video games designed to immerse you, and aren’t they all, in a sense, simulating something? Trying to define what makes an “immersive sim” has long been a running bit among creators and players. I’ve previously joked that it’s a game in which you can flush the toilets, due to how oddly ubiquitous that feature is in games like Prey, BioShock, and other genre standouts. Sincerely, though, I think of immersive sims as games that give you a puzzle box with a multitude of solutions, and it’s up to you how you solve it. In that sense, Skin Deep is a great immersive sim.
In the sci-fi comedy Skin Deep, you play Nina Pasadena, an Insurance Commando whose job is to save cats who have been kidnapped by space pirates–so long as their coverage is active. One crew, The Numb Bunch, is causing all sorts of havoc, commandeering a number of ships and keeping Nina busy saving her feline policyholders. If the setup sounds ridiculous, that’s on purpose. Eschewing the dystopian darkness and unflinching seriousness of many, if not most, “im-sims,” Skin Deep is reliably laugh-out-loud funny, whether it’s the quips enemies grunt as you sneak around various spaceships, or the emails you read from rescued cats in between missions.
Played in first-person, Skin Deep flexes its im-sim muscles in levels that feel excitingly open-ended and demand careful planning, while still asking you to improvise on-the-fly when things go awry. Each mission has a number of locked-up cats to save and enemies to evade or eliminate, and there’s no one right way to complete these objectives. A cat’s lockbox needs a key, for example, and you can find those by pickpocketing guards, reading memos and tracking one down some place, finding a Duper–a ranged device that instantly duplicates whatever item you’ve shot at–and doubling an otherwise hard-to-reach key, or via other methods I won’t spoil.
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