Skate Story Review – Poetry In Motion

Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5

Platform:
PlayStation 5, Switch 2, PC

Publisher:
Devolver Digital

Developer:
Sam Eng

Rating:
Everyone

You are a demon made of glass and pain. Literally. Looking to escape from Hell, you sign a contract with the Devil to devour the moons illuminating the realm’s many layers. Your steed is a skateboard, a forbidden object you’ll use to kick and push through the Underworld, acting as the Silver Surfer to your own Galactus. Skate Story’s strange premise and surreal art direction are equal parts alluring and head-scratching. While the gameplay is a mixed bag, I enjoyed this fascinating blend of extreme sports and biblical poetry.

Skateboarding enthusiasts shouldn’t expect to catch big air on halfpipes or memorize a lengthy list of tricks. This is a story-driven experience drawing narrative inspiration from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. The skater’s descent into the depths of a humorously bureaucratic Hell is laden with quirky, tortured souls I liked interacting with. The story itself is a mesmerizing and poetic onslaught of strange moments and dreamlike destinations every player will interpret differently, but I enjoyed how its effective throughline of hope and perseverance shines through. Best of all, you get to do a bunch of sick stunts along the way.

Skating is fun and easy to grasp thanks to simple and tight arcade-style controls. Moves are introduced at a good pace, allowing me to master relatively basic tricks like ollies, varials, grinds, and kickflips without overwhelming me. The small, skatepark-like hubs making up each layer of Hell are decent playgrounds to freely practice chaining moves to create combos. Small environmental interactions, like performing varials to cut grass or hitting ollies over special manholes, reward currency to purchase new skateboard cosmetics, such as decks and wheels. I appreciate how this structure encourages and rewards hitting tricks non-stop, but the hubs never offer more than a few simple ramps and railings, so they don’t remain exciting for long. By the second half, I lost the desire to mess around in these spaces and skated straight towards the more enjoyable main objective of filling my crystalline belly with moons.

Capturing a moon requires completing simple quests from the strange and tortured denizens. Finding cubes of wisdom for a sentient marble bust or helping a pigeon finish its manuscript by collecting scattered letters (a cheeky nod to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater) aren’t the deepest activities, but the sheer strangeness of the situations makes them more compelling than they would be otherwise. Skate Story thrives on its surreal vibes, chiefly its captivating art direction, which offers one of the most whimsical and imaginative interpretations of Hell I’ve ever seen. It trades grim fire and brimstone for a kaleidoscopic, cosmic film grain aesthetic that’s arguably worth the price of admission just to admire.

Gameplay picks up in the linear high-speed skating sequences where you traverse tricky courses and dodge obstacles across multiple checkpoints, often with a time limit. These segments are a blast thanks to a great sense of speed and how the psychedelic soundtrack swells as your skating becomes ever faster and more perilous; I strongly recommend wearing headphones. I would gladly trade the comparatively flat hub exploration for a larger playlist of these white-knuckled sprints.

Quick restarts soothe the sting of a wipeout, and I love how satisfyingly the glass skater shatters into pieces after an errant trick. Less cool are the occasional collision issues where the Skater clips through objects and, although less frequent, becomes stuck inside them. The most egregious example was in the final scene of the game, when I became trapped under geometry during the cinematic finale and had to restart it a few times, dampening an otherwise cool moment.

Devouring moons is also a highlight. These encounters play out as celestial boss battles where nailing tricks drains the moon’s health bars based on the quality of the combo, acting as intense exams of your speed and dexterity. The bouts remain consistently entertaining as new wrinkles are introduced. One chaotic battle pitted me against the laser-shooting demons of the Underworld’s law enforcement agency. Another challenged me to chase the moon and nail tricks within its constantly moving shadow. These battles are strong exclamation points to a level, and I always looked forward to them. Thus, it’s a shame that there’s no way to replay previous chapters to enjoy these segments again; you can only load your most recent checkpoint or restart the game from scratch, wiping your original save data in the process.

As Skate Story’s credits rolled, I wasn’t totally sure what to make of it. Despite its imperfections, I knew I liked it, but I struggled to articulate why. I won’t pretend that every metaphor or symbol resonated with me or even made sense. It’s a deeply poetic journey, and the way to enjoy any good poem is to focus more on how it made me feel rather than any literal interpretation. In that sense, I’ll fondly remember the awe I felt admiring this imaginatively conceived underworld, the adrenaline rush of barreling through courses as a shining beacon of defiance and perseverance, and the thrill of hitting stunts so sick that entire celestial bodies shatter at my awesomeness.