Skin Deep review: Why cats and pirates don't mix

Irish Independent

2 days ago

It involves an unorthodox kind of animal rescue, the sort where the felines crewing a spaceship have been captured by raiders and you're the righteous infiltrator who sneaks aboard to set them free. From this whimsical set-up, Californian developer Blendo Games constructs a series of freeform puzzles in which you improvise on the fly to stealthily scout the ship, dodge the pirates, and escape with the hostages.
Blendo has a sweet pedigree in this space, having impressed with stylised storytelling adventures such as 2012's Thirty Flights of Loving and 2016's Quadrilateral Cowboy.
Skin Deep extends those games' ideas, leaning into the freedom of choice at the core of an immersive sim. You kick off each mission by sneaking aboard a hijacked ship and gradually establishing the lay of the land – how many pirates, where the cats are at, which areas are locked down by passwords, etc.
You know the 'what' – find the jail keys, free the felines, flee the scene – but Blendo leaves the 'how' up to you. Initial impressions suggest stealth is the optimum strategy. You can pickpocket the pirates and creep through copious vents to conceal your presence – leaving hardly a trace of yourself after the rescue.
But Blendo soon introduces random complications and tempting, if drastic alternative methods present themselves. Sure, you can find guns but why shoot the baddies when you could blow out a window and sending them spinning into the vacuum of space? What about those hacking grenades that can turn the ship's defences against the pirates? The permutations spiral in your favour, so long as you're quick and quick-witted.
The odds are often overwhelming – particularly when raider reinforcements arrive – but Skin Deep won't punish you too harshly for failure. Save points are readily accessible and the enemies err on the side of deeply dumb, making your evasive tactics generally successful.
Blendo seeds its fiction with mischievous humour, from the lamebrained actions of the space invaders to the catty mewing of the trapped animals. But it's the slapstick comedy of the confrontations with the pirates in Skin Deep that draws the biggest laughs.
After all your efforts, you'd think the moggies would be profoundly grateful to you for saving their hides – but you'll be lucky to get a mollifying meow. Typical cats.