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Irish Independent
3 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
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.
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.
