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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
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Plaything – how Black Mirror took on its scariest ever subject: a 1990s PC games magazine
Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it's Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It's the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he's meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he's caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise. The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker. He began his writing career penning satirical features and blistering reviews for PC Zone magazine, one of the two permanently warring PC mags of the era (I shared an office with the other, PC Gamer). In Plaything, it's PC Zone that Cameron Walker writes for, and there are several scenes taking place in its office, which in the programme is depicted as a reasonably grownup office space with tidy computer workstations and huge windows. I do not think the production design team got this vision from Brooker. 'Zone had far less of the corporate workplace feel than the episode showed, and much more of a kids in the basement, youth club-cum-nightclub vibe to it,' says Paul Presley, who worked on PC Zone at the time. 'It was a handful of messy, cluttered desks stuck in a windowless basement office round the back of Oxford Street (later Tottenham Court Road). We'd have killed for floor-to-ceiling windows! Editorial, art and production were all on top of each other, music blasting from the office stereo, usually furnished by the neighbouring Metal Hammer magazine. Desks were personal spaces, overflowing with paper, mags, trinkets, swag and tons and tons of CDs.' In the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I also contacted another PC Zone alumnus Richie Shoemaker for his recollections. 'Although there were windows along one side, they were below street level and smeared with London grime,' he says. 'The sills were piled high with dusty magazines, broken joysticks and likely-empty game boxes. It was perpetual night for the best part of eight years down there.' The episode was more accurate on the games themselves – the first scene in the office shows Cam playing Doom, when the editor comes over, shows him the front cover of the latest issue of the mag with System Shock on the cover, then asks Cameron if he's finished his review of Bullfrog's classic adventure game Magic Carpet. '[Plaything] is good on the timelines,' says Shoemaker. 'Playing Doom in the office was of course standard – although when I joined the team Quake was the lunchtime and afterwork deathmatch of choice. The Magic Carpet review did appear in the issue after System Shock (which was actually Charlie's first cover review), but it got 96%, not 93% and was written by launch editor Paul Lakin – who went on to work at the Foreign Office.' He also reckons the episode's grizzled old editor might have been inspired by then deputy editor, Chris Anderson, who according to Shoemaker was 'quite a vampiric character who seemed to exist on a diet of cigarettes and Ultima Online.' Most fascinating to me though is the inspirational origin of the Thronglets virtual pet game. Most reviewers have been referencing Tamagotchi, the keychain pet toy that took the world by storm int the late 90s. Brooker himself has referenced it in an interview. However, a much more likely candidate was the 1996 title Creatures, in which players cared for generations of cuddly-looking critters. Although it looked like a cutesy pet game it was in fact a highly sophisticated artificial life experiment, created by the distinctly sci-fi-sounding CyberLife Technology. Players needed to try to establish breeding populations of the creatures – called norns – but your control over them was limited as they were coded with advanced neural networks and had functioning internal bodily systems regulating their behaviours and physical abilities. CyberLife made a big deal of the complexity and experimental nature of the game: the box came with a warning sticker stating 'Digital DNA Enclosed' and the blurb on the back cautioned players that they would be unleashing the world's first artificial life-science experiment – which is exactly what Plaything is about. Creatures creator Steve Grand bears similarities to the Plaything (and Bandersnatch) coder Colin Ritman. He was a programmer who got tired of conventional games and wanted to try something extremely new. He went on to write a book about Creatures and its development, Creation: Life and How to Make It, and later became an internationally renowned roboticist, famously developing a robot orangutan. Surely the most Black Mirror career trajectory ever. In 2011, he started work on a spiritual follow-up to Creatures named Grandroids, which like Thronglets was about developing a race of intelligent AI aliens – Grand launched a Kickstarter for it in 2016. The project has yet to surface although Grand has a new website for it under the name Phantasia. All very intriguing. This is one of the things I love about Black Mirror, and indeed the use of technology and video games in conventional drama: this is an arcane world full of eccentric people no one outside the industry has heard of, yet the toys they make have massive ramifications. Personally, I wanted to see a lot more of the PC Zone as imagined by the programme, but I understand that the sinister Thronglets were the real focus. Maybe one day there will be a full Silicon Valley-style drama series about the games industry in the 1990s – it was a hell of a time. For now, it's interesting to see the world both Brooker and I inhabited being used as the venue for dystopian fiction – even if they really did get it completely wrong about those windows.
