Review | Skin Deep - More Than Meets The Eye
Skin Deep is a comedic, stealth-based immersive sim set in the far reaches of space. For around 15 hours, I was put in charge of controlling Nina Pasadina, an insurance agent tasked with saving a race of highly intelligent yet physically helpless beings known as cats. In order to rescue these important specimens, I was tasked with raiding a slew of space pirates with the ability to regenerate, causing me to flush decapitated heads down the toilet, stink it up in trash chutes and discuss the philosophy of skateboarding cat tricks. It’s safe to say that the experience was anything but skin deep.
The main objective of each mission involves locating the whereabouts of key cards to unlock the cats from their prisons. This premise may seem simple, but it became much more involved once I figured out how to best achieve this goal. One of the first things I appreciated about Skin Deep was the innocuous Post-it notes dotted around the environment that opened my third eye in a comedic and involved manner. These notes are an essential part of the gameplay loop as they hint at the location of key cards, divulge secrets about the level, and sometimes give out codes to hack core functions of the ship through lines that often breathed life into a given stage.
Alongside the notes are a ton of subversive weapons that can be picked up, such as banana skins, deodorant and EMP grenades that allowed me to take out the Numb Bunch pirates with as much or as little grace as I desired. The equipment at my disposal caused noise, shock, death, destruction to public property, and sometimes all four at once while often serving secondary functions. To stealth fans, this may sound like standard fare, but there is far more to every system than meets the eye.
For example, a simple takedown involving a banana skin starts off by placing the slippery peel in an enemy's pathway, which will presumably stun them. Next, the enemy needs to be killed by being bludgeoned by an environmental object using the time-honoured tradition of piggyback mounting, which is a lot harder than it sounds. After that, they need to be flushed into the depths of space to eliminate the risk of regeneration. If no other method is unlocked, this involves popping their head off and finding a single-use toilet to clog up in aid of the mission. Despite sounding brutal, this entire process is presented in an over-the-top manner with little to no blood, and the result is that every combat encounter feels like a vaudeville routine in game form.
There is one brutal part of the bludgeoning process, and it involves strategically selecting the object that’ll provide the fatal blows. Some environmental objects are rather innocuous; hard surfaces that perform the task without any repercussions, but others have lasting consequences. I often came across objects with glass casings that made Nina’s footprints visible and caused her to bleed out when bashed against. There were also surfaces with breakable screens that showed vital information and made saving possible before being used as weapons.
While some situations may sound disastrous on paper, there's always a way to recover or even seize these opportunities. Going back to the environmental hazards highlighted in the brutal situation above, I often found it useful to utilise these items when a repair bot or healing station was nearby, as save stations and alarms were often conveniently placed outside an enemy's line of sight. You can also utilise this same mindset after being caught, as I managed to turn the most dangerous ship defence mechanism, its laser-guided turret, into an unstoppable weapon. Honestly, I could go on all day about the ways opportunistic players can take advantage of the Numb Bunch, but it's more fun to discover new methods for yourself.
And besides, I need to introduce the stars of this spacefaring adventure, the ships themselves, which increase the amount of possible approaches to an immeasurable degree through intricate, multi-layered environments and a diegetic on-board comms system that blows the doors off the game’s prior potential. Each ship is equipped with fuse boxes that can open up an array of ventilation shafts, trash chutes, air locks and windows. Superficially, they function as new traversal methods, disposal units and environmental hazards, but, in practice, they elevate the immersive sandbox to an extent that I frankly wasn’t prepared for.
Ventilation shafts, while dusty, gave me the ability to sneak around from room to room while being able to look at and hack every security camera to plan a foolproof route around the ship. Airlocks provided me with a safe way to explore my surroundings from outside the ship, allowing me to check out the room layouts from every angle through the windows while functioning as one of the most devastating environmental hazards in the game. Trash chutes double up as unlimited disposal units and act as the most convenient shortcuts on the ship, which gave me a way to bypass locked doors at the risk of getting stinky.
Later on in the game, some levels spice up the gameplay loop with elaborate gimmicks that made me think outside the box. I won't ruin any of the late-stage levels, but these challenges felt incredibly rewarding to either interact with or overcome, and it's impressive that, even with all the ideas squeezed into the game's core design, Blendo Games managed to one-up itself right to the very end.
Despite all of its complexities, the most surprising thing about Skin Deep is its natural ability to stay approachable. Quite often I find the amount of options presented to me in stealth sims are overwhelming, but Blendo Games have essentially solved my problem of choice paralysis for me by making its systems accessible. Skin Deep encouraged me to save scumm through accessible terminals, clearly pointed out all the available items in eyesight area through its recon system, provided instructional labels to every item and environmental hazard and mapped many functions to the environment through diegetic design. Blendo also made the bold decision to constrict Nina’s inventory to just five slots.
As strange as it sounds, the constraints of the inventory discouraged me from brute forcing my way through situations, as unexpected encounters forced me to think on my feet. Thinking about what items to prioritise and save for later made revisiting parts of the map essential to my plans. Quite often, items reacted to situations I wasn’t present for, causing absolute chaos to the pirates and their patrols. Every time I got the notification, I always found myself on the edge of my seat to see the domino effect that ensued from the decision and couldn’t wait to go back to witness the results so that I could form a new plan on the fly.
Once all the cats get rescued, a new objective rears its head in the form of action-oriented gameplay as an onslaught of reinforcements gets called in. Before jumping into the fray, the seemingly innocent victims provide Nina with an arsenal of heavy-duty weapons to either blast everyone on site or stage a robbery with. There are many ways to form an escape plan, but I found that the most effective methods usually involved preemptively opening up the level and clearing hazards before rescuing the feeble felines.
Outside of the planning, I unfortunately found the action-packed climaxes of most levels to be a huge letdown in comparison to their sublime stealth-focused setups, and it all comes down to one thing: the implementation of the escape key.
All reinforcements come in through a pod that docks through one of the airlocks in each spacecraft, which is easy to track from outside the ship, and one of these new hires has an escape key that takes control of the pod. With all the artillery, it just makes sense to camp outside the airlock and take out the pirate with the key, as the escape pod is right behind them. I think it would have been a lot more fun if I needed to find the escape key in a hard-to-reach area that required me to move away from the objective. But, considering these moments can be cleared in just a minute, I can’t say it detracted from the overall experience to a detrimental degree.
Unfortunately, some technical issues broke the pace up in a more considerable manner. Firstly, the load times I experienced were pretty egregious, it took around 1-2 minutes to load up a save from the main menu screen and 30-60 seconds to jump into a level from the lobby. Loading up a save during gameplay was considerably faster, though, around 5 seconds or less.* But it's worth bearing in mind that Skin Deep is made in id Tech4, an open-source game engine from the early 2000s, and it's honestly impressive that this technically detailed sandbox can run at all on such an ageing piece of software.
Another thing that I should point out are the save issues I encountered. On a couple of the later levels, multiple crashes occurred during my play session when I tried to save, which caused my most recent files to corrupt. That being said, I was mostly playing on a review build of the game, and the save issue has not cropped up in my limited time with the release version, so your experience may vary from mine.
I’ve decided to save the presentation and story until the end, as I would be remiss not to showcase Skin Deep’s gameplay front and centre. But don't get me wrong, it’s clear that Blendo has also put a lot of effort into ensuring that its pulpy sci-fi world stays consistently entertaining against the looming shadow of its mechanical prowess.
One of the biggest showcases of this comes after every mission in which Nina gets to chill out with some cassettes and respond to the emails from the cats she’s just rescued. Responding to emails may sound blasé, but each of the furballs have their own distinctly catty personalities that lead to some rather unconventional conversations. Some colourful characters include Dusty, a country cat on a mission to sell cows, a film buff obsessed with flicks like Hatchet Highschool VII, and Gubo, an extreme sports fan who wants to see humans pulling off cat skateboarding tricks.
Comedic stylings such as these permeate the entire experience by adding a level of fun to reading notes and labels and overhearing key conversations, but it really comes into its own with the story set pieces and the dynamic visual gags that often accompany them. Being familiar with Blendo’s other titles, this came as no surprise to me, but that's not a bad thing.
Walking around elaborate scenes with an overwhelming amount of silly background elements and interacting with postmodern devices that reveal themselves to have dramatic flair always brought a smile to my face, even if the sudden transition between scenes sometimes felt weirdly awkward and disorienting.
A new addition to Blendo’s signature style involves the implementation of voice acting. It honestly felt surreal hearing such stylistically cartoony dialogue coming out of characters’ mouths for the first time, but the voiceover artists went above and beyond to make their cadences fit the energy of the game’s outlandish personalities. That said, I did sometimes wish there was a little less yapping during the missions themselves, especially from Nina and the cats, as their exchanges felt out of place during silent espionage.
There is an overarching story that connects these elements together, as Nina uses the money earned from insurance missions to uncover the secrets about the Numb Bunch and their charismatic leader. Without going into spoilers, it culminates in a simple story about alternate realities, unchecked executives and the effects that environmental conditions have on human growth.
If you can’t tell at this point, I’m a big fan of the meticulous design decisions that went into Skin Deep. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the actions that are possible within the almost non-existent constraints of its sandbox, and it would be a shame to say more and potentially ruin the magic of discovering new combinations for the first time. If you're looking for an in-depth title that’ll make your imagination run wild, I cannot recommend Skin Deep enough, especially if you’re a streamer. It basically plays like a crazier version of Among Us.
*I timed multiple different load screens on builds dating from 23rd April - 30th April 2025 to get these numbers. A hotfix came out as I was writing this review, on 2nd May, which seems to have drastically lowered these times.
