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Irish Independent
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Skin Deep review: Why cats and pirates don't mix
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.
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Skin Deep review – kitty rescue immersive-sim is slapstick fun in a cartoony playground
When it comes to gamer-gatekeeping, there are few genres as snootily guarded as the immersive sim. From PC classic System Shock to the Dickensian Dishonored 2, these system-heavy sandboxes are video gaming's equivalent to avant garde electronica or the films of Darren Aronofsky, adored by critics and genreheads but largely baffling to everyone else. Much like those elitist fandoms, the im-sim's loudest cheerleaders often look down on linear blockbusters with similar sneer. No, Assassin's Creed player, you cannot sit with us. While massive games such as Tears of the Kingdom have recently flirted with elements of the genre, there's still a surprising lack of breezier, beginner-friendly immersive sims. Enter Blendo Games' Skin Deep – an attempt to cosy-fi the genre. Doing away with the sour-faced sci-fi of Deus Ex, Skin Deep sends you hurtling into space with a premise ripped straight out of a noughties web comic. You play Nina Pasadena, an insurance commando sworn to rescue feline fleets from raiding pirates. As you answer each well-insured tabby's urgent distress call, Nina quietly sneaks across the raided ship, using whatever tools she can cobble together to rescue her kitty clientele. The story is incredibly silly – more on that later – but Skin Deep's cacophony of colliding systems deserves to be taken seriously. As I stalk my prey with a book and a lighter, I quietly release a cloud of hand sanitiser before bashing his head in with a hefty novel. Before he can draw his gun, I leap backwards, chucking my flickering lighter into the cloud of sanitiser, engulfing the poor pirate in an explosion of glistening flames. It's this gleefully slapstick approach that sees Skin Deep at its best – a playground that embraces the absurdity of its simulation with a Cheshire's grin. It's not all design by worship and tribute, however, with Blendo introducing some fun gameplay twists of its own. Pirates can respawn after being taken out, detachable floating 'skull savers' attached to their heads hovering desperately back to their lifeless bodies. Nina must swiftly dispose of each screaming head before they can seek revenge. From shattering ship windows and sending a skull hurtling into outer space, to flushing screaming heads down a toilet, finding new ways to bin each bonce adds a welcome layer of variety. The duplicating 'duper gun' is another fun innovation, allowing players to sneak up to unsuspecting guards and instantly copy whatever items they hold – from weapons to those crucial cat-freeing keys. Each fully mapped ship exterior also allows you to leap out of the airlock and scale the outside of the ship, surveying the vessel for sneaky new entry points. In one mission, I come crashing through the ship's external window. As I land on the bridge feet first, I pull a bloodied glass shard from my foot and fling it straight into a pirate's face, leaving me grinning like a cat-loving John McClane. Blendo Games understands that the best immersive sims are inherently cartoony playgrounds, sandboxes where every item is a tool for maleficence. From chucking pepper at a guard and making them sneeze so hard they pass out, to riding a pirate's back and charging them straight into a wall, you certainly couldn't accuse Skin Deep of taking itself too seriously. Unfortunately, I started to wish that the writers took it all more seriously. As freed cuboid cats leap from their rectangular cages with a sparkle and an enthusiastic MEOWW, and I reply to paw-penned emails asking me to find quirky VHS tapes, it dawns on me that I'm playing Deus Ex for Disney adults. While Skin Deep's gags may well be catnip for the right player, the never-ending feline puns and overly-zany tone had me cringing, eliciting more grimaces than guffaws. If the cat-filled concept wasn't millennially coded enough, Skin Deep is made using Doom 3's 2004 id tech engine. Swapping the PC classic's dimly-lit corridors for brightly coloured environments, it's a knowingly nerdy-nod to the hardcore. While a cool idea on paper, in practice the archaic aesthetic falls short of the intended retro cool chic, instead looking disappointingly primitive. Still, if beauty is only Skin Deep, for £15, this is a colourful, breezy introduction to an infamously inaccessible genre. The end result is an enjoyable, if muddled game, a deceptively deep immersive sim that may be too silly for genre fans and too low-poly to entice newcomers. This isn't the genre's breakout hit then – a slapstick immersive sim using Doom 3's engine was likely always destined to be niche – but if you can stomach Skin Deep's saccharine silliness, there's 10 hours of futuristic feline fun batting its paw in your direction. Skin Deep is out now, £15
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
There's a crazy number of demos on Steam right now—here are the five we think you should try
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Sometimes during Steam Next Fest I enter a sort of fugue state where I download like a hundred game demos and go to town. I give them fifteen minutes to grab me. If they do, they get 15 more minutes. If they're fun for half an hour, I play until they're done or until an hour passes. Sometimes they're good enough that I keep playing them even after that hour, which is rare, but that's how I arrived at these five games: I played 83 of this year's Steam Next Fest demos and these were my favorites, or at least the ones that stuck out most in my mind. This was the biggest Next Fest 2025 surprise for me, a game I didn't really expect to do anything special. I figured that after Bomber Crew and then the sort-of-tired Spaceship Crew I'd seen everything developer Runner Duck had going. Except it seems like they've found the perfect theme for their game mechanics: Wasteland warfare. You build up your war rig and take it on the road, running down caravans of enemy cars and blowing them to pieces while keeping your own in running shape. You set up speed and steer, but also use your crew's special powers on foes while you micromanage the crew to repel boarders, put out fires, and make repairs. If it were just that simple then I'd be interested but not impressed. The thing that clinched this as a top-5 demo for me is how the post-apocalyptic-badlands setting has potential for interesting variety in what you'll get to do. You'll escort valuable civilians from one point to another, take down marauding gangs, and conquer other crews' fortresses to expand your territory and demand tribute from them—all while trying to keep your previous conquests satisfied and in line. Skin Deep is a brilliant mess of a concept from a wildly diverse, veteran studio: Blendo Games. It's an immersive sim, and this is your job: You're the guy who gets put in frozen storage on a spaceship hauling valuables. If pirates take the ship, you get thawed out in your secret spot and take the ship back. You against an army of pirates. You have a pistol, but you have no shoes, so that kind of balances out. Blendo says it's a game where you "sneak, subvert, and sabotage to survive" which yeah, that's exactly right. You can sabotage the security checkpoints to shock people. You can jump on a dude's back and choke him out. You can go outside a ship in your spacesuit and then blow out a window and watch everyone get sucked out and then casually float inside the ship and trigger the emergency shutters and laugh your ass off. You can walk on broken glass and get it stuck in your feet which sucks. You can free the ship's cats to help you. This is some real Blendo Games vintage is what I'm saying and I like it. Shape of Dreams is a promising, yet subtly surprising, mix of MOBA and action roguelike gameplay. It's something like an isometric Risk of Rain in format but with much more focused, combo-driven game mechanics. It's playable in roguelike runs alone or with friends, with your characters taking on more generalist roles if you're playing alone or specializing if you're playing with pals, as in a MOBA—tanking and crowd control suddenly become options when you've got buddies along. The characters themselves are weirdly varied in that way modern MOBA designs are, too: Lizard with a shotgun, knight in full plate, floating wizard fox. You know the drill. The gameplay is surprisingly smooth, which is what really sells it. You've got standard attack and dash type movement you'd expect from action roguelikes, but on top of that you're stacking and customizing a set of skills that you pick up along the way. Each of those gets its own slots for gems, all of which do weird stuff: Add a bonus to the attack every 10 seconds, or let you use it to steal life, or blow you up for extra damage. I foresee some groups losing a month or more to playing this co-op when it releases. My final two Next Fest 2025 favorites are both king related. They're also both in a similar genre and have similar mechanics, but pressed to choose between the two I wouldn't do it. Even the developers have recognized the similarities enough to offer a bundle of the two. In 9 Kings, you're plopping down buildings and armies on the grid of your kingdom. You get to play one card, building or unit, from your hand each round before an enemy army attacks and your troops fight theirs in a little autobattle. 9 Kings is a deckbuilder of sorts, except your pool of cards is determined by your own chosen king's cards combined with those of the enemy kings you fight. Your job is to figure out how to combine your chosen card pool with the other guys' card pools to make an absolutely busted combo of some kind that snowballs out of all control and runs down armies until an enemy king shows up and you whoop their butt in person. It's a fun combination of limited time—you can only play one or two cards—with limited resources—you're not sure if you'll get more units, enchantments for the units, buildings that buff over time, or towers that take down enemies. Layer on top of that the spice of roguelike life: Weird, run-defining artifacts that'll do stuff like spit out a ton of free units, or fundamentally alter how a unit works. I think this one's going to be something special to watch for on release. This second royal choice started a bit slow, but it grew on me fast once I realized how it wanted me to play. In The King is Watching, you drop buildings from your little stable of cards, then use them to generate resources and units in real time. The twist? A little box on the map represents your king's gaze, and only the buildings actively under your attention do anything at all. That's where it turns frantic, as balancing your resource incomes and unit production in real time is a kind of delicious chaos that few games pull off well. You have to figure out how to build a combination of units that can keep you defended while you get the piles of resources you need to build advanced buildings and climb your tech tree—oh, and find the resources in there somewhere to expand your gaze area and repair the walls and expand your army size. You can even find random magic spells to throw at enemy waves, which are also interspersed with events that let you pick nice bonuses in addition to being comedic pixel fantasy versions of popular memes. There's a lot of character here that's really attractive, and I must recommend it. Those were my top five, but here's one more for good measure: Cauldron is a turn-based RPG where you're a little witch and adventuring party who battle and win primarily through… minigames. It's an oddly compelling mix of filling out a big ol' tree of upgrades and playing funny minigames that'll appeal to the incremental-idle crowd and the RPG crowd at the same time. To those of you who like the keywords I've dropped above this is guaranteed, absolute catnip.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Blendo Games' oddball sci-fi shooter Skin Deep hits PC on April 30
Blendo Games' latest installment of interactive weirdness, Skin Deep, is due to hit Steam on April 30, after nearly seven years of development. Skin Deep is a first-person sci-fi shooter, but it doesn't look (or smell?) like any of the dramatic space operas or realistic, precision-based games that generally flood this genre. Skin Deep takes place on a futuristic cargo starship managed by an insurance corporation and filled with its clients' valuables, and you're the cryogenically frozen security officer kept on board in case something goes awry. Space pirates ambush the ship, your body thaws, and a non-linear game of shooting, sneaking, sabotaging and smelling ensues, all presented in Blendo's signature blocky 3D style. Skin Deep features a mix of puzzles, madcap comedy and action scenes, and alongside the first-person gunplay, there's a sneeze mechanic and a stink system that sometimes leaves little smelly clouds in your wake, alerting nearby pirates to your presence. It's like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but with fewer medieval peasants and way more space cats. Did we mention there are a bunch of cats that you have to save on the ship? Because there are, and some of them are dressed in little cowboy outfits. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. For the odor mechanics, players become stinky only when it makes sense narratively, like when they're expelled from the ship's trash shoot alongside all the fish bones and rotten things. Your smell clouds subside once you figure out how to wash up. Sneezing follows a similar in-game logic. "If you're crawling through a dusty vent your little sneezy air level will increase, then you'll do a big sneeze noise," Chung told Engadget in 2021. "And there's a bag of pepper that we have. If you shoot it, a big cloud of pepper flies out. You can pick up a pepper bag and throw it at someone and they'll start sneezing." Skin Deep is the most action-focused game that Blendo has ever made. The independent studio, led by Brendon Chung, has a lineup of award-winning titles under its belt, including Quadrilateral Cowboy, Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving. These titles tend to highlight clever puzzles and polygonal oddities, and Skin Deep is the first Blendo project to feature first-person shooter mechanics. That's not to say FPS development is a new idea for Chung. He got his start in game development by customizing levels in Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Quake 2 and Doom 3 when he was a kid, and FPS games are often what he's drawn to as a player. "I've played like a bazillion FPS games because I just really enjoy them," Chung said in 2021, "but I feel like there's so much that can be explored and that I wish these games would explore." You know, like well-dressed cats and stink systems. When we talked with Chung four years ago, the Skin Deep FAQ page read, "Is Skin Deep going to take 4+ years of development time like your previous game Quadrilateral Cowboy?" And the answer was, "I hope not." Today, there's an "(update: oops...)" added to that response. Development on Skin Deep started around July 2018, according to the FAQ. Skin Deep is published by Annapurna Interactive and it's heading to Steam on April 30. A new demo is live now on Steam, as part of the Steam Next Fest hullaballoo. Steam Next Fest runs from February 24 at 1PM ET to March 3 at 1PM ET, showcasing a ton of fresh game demos and developer insights on the storefront.
