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Irish Independent
4 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.
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
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'It's like Die Hard but with more comedy': Immersive FPS Skin Deep has talking cats, banana traps, and enemies you can disable by making them sneeze
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Space piracy is a real problem in the future, but luckily there's a new and exciting loss prevention system to meet the needs of cautious space travelers. That's where you come in. In Skin Deep, you're Nina Pasadena, a former assassin turned insurance commando, part of the deluxe insurance package for corporate starships. You're frozen and stuck in a drawer on the ship, to be defrosted and put into action if pirates show up and try to kidnap the crew. Skin Deep is an immersive FPS from Blendo Games, maker of Quadrilateral Cowboy and Gravity Bone. Basically, it's like Deus Ex or Dishonored, but you can set banana peel traps for enemies to slip on and throw pepper in people's faces to make them sneeze so much they can't fight back. Also, you work for a company run by talking cats. (It's the future.) "It's very light and very goofy," said Brendan Chung, creative director of Blendo Games, in the Annapurna Interactive Showcase today. "But it treats this light and goofy stuff very sincerely and very earnestly." "It's like Die Hard but with more comedy," said Blendo Games programmer Sanjay Madhav. Unfortunately, the cryotech process that turns you into an insurance popsicle doesn't allow you to freeze your weapons, so you'll have to make do with whatever you find on the ship or can take from the pirates. A banana found in a locker can become a slippery trap. Ragweed thrown at someone will stun them with sneezes (though if you step into the "pepper cloud" it'll also cause you to sneeze, which can alert guards). There are traditional weapons like pistols and rifles to grab, but isn't it more fun to turn on a gas vent, lure a dimwitted pirate over to it, flick on a lighter, and roast him like a Christmas goose? There's a lot of neat systems you can glimpse in the trailer, like eliminating a pirate, taking his walkie-talkie, and then mimicking his voice when the pirate boss asks him to check in. You can also fake your own death by making it appear you've been purged from the ventilation system into space, so the pirates will stop looking for you. The pirates are pretty crafty themselves, though: the trailer shows one being killed, at which point his head is automatically encased in a cryo-dome so it can be placed onto a regenerated body, essentially making him immortal. The solution to that? Flush his head down the toilet. Standard insurance procedure. Skip Deep uses the Doom 3 engine, which is 20 years old and gives the game a "timeless look" according to Chung. Announced way back in 2018, it's finally almost here: Skin Deep launches on April 30. There's a demo on Steam available now.
