Skin Deep review

Skin Deep lays bare a truth about the immersive sims we anoint to holiness: Beneath a veneer of grizzled assassins and sunglassed corpo agents, beyond the virtues of player choice and non-linear level design, is a genre by and for goofballs.

The allure of a hackable computer or pickable pockets is catnip for troublemakers—a license to orchestrate pranks on NPCs who can’t send you to the principal’s office, and laugh in their faces. Immersive sims, in all their glory, are the sacred virtualization of shenanigans, and Skin Deep is the patron saint of slipping on banana peels.

Death by peel is only the fifteenth funniest way I’ve solved a problem in Skin Deep, Blendo Games’ latest, built with the 21-year-old id Tech 4 engine. In the shoes bare feet of Nina Passedena, a MIAO Corp deep freeze insurance commando deployed to save crews of cats frominvading pirates, I’ve sent guards into sneezing fits with boxes of pepper, turned soap into an explosive, flushed myself down a trash chute to make a quick escape, and subjected an entire pirate crew to ear-splitting jazz.

You’d think MIAO Corp’s top agent would be issued a gun, knife, or at least a leather-wrapped cudgel to drive off intruders, but thanks to the “complications of the deep freeze process,” equipment protocol is procure-on-site, Solid Snake-style. Such is the zany, charmingly Die Hard setups behind Skin Deep’s intricate sandboxes: Nina is outnumbered, outgunned, and literally shoeless, but she still holds all the cards.

License to spill

It would have been in line with genre tradition to give players a gun from the jump, and I suspect easier to design open-ended levels around, but Blendo’s characteristic distaste for the usual is Skin Deep’s secret sauce. Nina’s empty pockets constantly pushed me to intimately learn spaces and look for utility in mundane objects. There is no random tat in Skin Deep. Desk succulents are sneeze bombs, electrical conduits are baseball bats, and broken glass is an accident waiting to happen.

Skin Deep nurtures experimentation with its ingenious Zoom Lens—a generous information gathering tool that lets Nina read notes, labels, and stickers from any distance. Not only were these environmental clues often funny, but they taught me everything I needed to know about what I was holding without drowning in tutorials—like how eight levels in, I finally learned that bashing a walkie-talkie against a wall makes it spark, a crucial ingredient for starting fires or triggering explosions.

The complex simulation at the core of Skin Deep has a way of turning best-laid plans into predictably unpredictable Buster Keaton routines. Like the time I accidentally helped a guard kill himself.

Franklin’s fault

Nearly an hour into an early level, I’d snuck onto the bridge of a ship through a vent and clocked the key I needed to escape hanging from the belt of a pirate named Franklin. Minutes earlier I’d been gifted a single homing grenade—a reward for safely evacuating the crew—and decided to test its destructive power on Franklin.

It bonked off his head, exploded, and nearly killed him, but he was pissed. Bullets started flying, Franklin whiffed his shots, and one flew toward the window behind me. According to the event log—yes, Skin Deep is the sort of game that’s so systemic that you sometimes need an event log to decipher what just happened—eight things occurred in the following two seconds:

1. Soda (empty) destroyed by: Seeker Grenade (sorry empty soda can, didn’t see you standing there)
2. Window shattered by: Bullet (This one’s on Franklin)
3. Franklin destroyed (He suffocated, but Nina’s fine thanks to her third lung)
4. Cat Key interacted with: WindowSeal Lever (Wait why did the window close? Of course, a different key got sucked out the window and bonked the emergency seal on its way, restoring gravity)
5. Lost in space: Cat Key (So long friend)
6. Ship Authority Key destroyed (I guess it was pretty dumb to set off a grenade next to the key I need to complete the level)
7. Ship Authority Key sent to Lost and Found machine (Thankfully, Blendo Games thought this could happen and spawned another)
8. Air Freshener created: Flammable Cloud (With gravity restored, a floating can of body spray fell to the ground and squirted)

I stood there cackling for a good few seconds after the happy disaster, piecing together the layered interactions that made it possible and pretending it was all part of a genius plan.

Pushing buttons

I’m still thinking about how that key just happened to smack the window seal. It’s the moment I fell hard for Skin Deep, because only the best videogames consider every moving object a valid projectile.

It took me back to that incredible, eye-opening moment in Prey (2017) where you learn a seemingly useless nerf crossbow is actually a clutch “finger launcher” perfect for opening doors, pressing buttons, and unlocking security terminals. This is a game primarily made up of nerf crossbow moments.

Though maybe the design choice I admire most in Skin Deep is how it counters the “kill every guard I come across” playstyle that coasted me through countless Dishonored and Deus Ex missions.

You see, the Numb Bunch pirate gang is equipped with jarred noggins that, if killed, detach from the body and magically return to a regeneration pad. The only way to permanently take a piece off the board is to dump their heads into space. Convenient, except the pirates have locked down all the windows, vents, trash chutes, and airlocks. That means offing guards is always an option, but it comes with a cost: You can pocket a head to dump later, but that’s precious inventory space wasted.

The dynamic creates a natural progression through maps as I comb over notes and PDAs to find codes that unlock ship functions. More access means a place to dump heads, but also free roam of the barge’s exteriors that often hide fun secrets exclusive to the level.

It’s such a nice, tidy, almost annoyingly clever system. Skin Deep is overflowing with similarly small but smart touches that could’ve only come from the mind of someone with strong opinions about the sophistication of modern stealth games:

• Guards are tuned with just the right amount of perception and stupidity to be fun to sneak around, but will immediately punish a close call by making sure all their friends are still conscious
• Nina’s insurance commando implants include a “Memory Palace” that automatically records a copy of all the notes she’s read so far, so you don’t have to remember codes but still need to go looking for them
• Nina can snap her fingers to attract guards, yell to trigger an alert, lie down to become a smaller target, or spit to push buttons from a distance
• Because it’d be too easy for Nina to spend most of her time in vents like Adam Jensen, a “sneeze” meter gradually fills the longer you stay in the dusty shafts
• After the initial cat rescue, a second escape phase begins that hands Nina guns, grenades, and lethal traps to (optionally) let loose on the rest of the ship

Sticky landing

By the time I rolled credits, there was no question that Skin Deep is among the best and deepest stealth sandboxes I’ve ever played in. Its only major flaw is that stealth sandboxes are all it has to offer, and they suffer from sameness.

It’s a symptom of a deeper problem with its story, the one aspect of Skin Deep that’s disappointing on all fronts. In 11 hours, I was surprised my goals never evolved past saving cats and escaping the ship. That lack of thematic variety ends up mattering, because Skin Deep’s level design can go ten rounds with all the immersive sim greats, but they inevitably blur together.

Neat barge-specific gimmicks aside, they’re missing a proper identity to build memories off—there is no mission that’s “the heist one” or “the one at a gala” or “the one with an annoying boss fight.” They’re all the ones where you save the cats.

Nina’s story is similarly sparse, happening in the gaps between missions as she works in her off time to track down the leader of the Numb Bunch. It’s a fun little spy romp with slick storytelling told in Blendo’s signature style of environmental exposition and mid-gameplay scene cuts, but its Bond-y interludes are entirely detached from Nina’s day-to-day commando duties, and the payoff is just OK.

I also would’ve liked more levels, but not because Skin Deep is too short. I want more because Blendo has crafted an endlessly expandable concept of insurance commandos dispatching meddlesome space pirates, which is probably why it’s the studio’s second game with full modding support (please hook me up, map makers).

The truth is that new immersive sims don’t come around very often, so I could’ve settled for something half as interactive, surprising, or downright weird as Skin Deep, but that’s not what Blendo does. Skin Deep is peak improv problem-solving unmarred by the dour dystopias this genre is built on. A genuine one of one.