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The world of Skate Story feels trippy, surreal, and absurdist. This competent homage to the essence of skateboarding bursts with giddy experimentalism reminiscent of the early-to-mid 2010s indie scene: The Beginner’s Guide, Undertale, The Stanley Parable, and Fez. It’s the type of game we see much less of these days, resplendent with the plucky, boundless creativity that’s the reserve of those on the fringes of mainstream game development and design.
Released under the rarely-straying curatorial eyes of Devolver Digital and developed by New York native Sam Eng, Skate Story is about popping sickeningly steezy nollie tres through a stratified underworld to gobble up moons to fulfill your end of a sketchy deal with the devil. Succeed, and you’ll be granted freedom from this oppressive, angular hell.
Geometry class
Skate Story unfolds with kaleidoscopic artistry: a purring rabbit playing guide to a moon-munching demon made of glass, a philosophising granite statue, sentient garments, gnarled ledges, and, even sharper, weeping city lights made grainy as if copied over and over on a grubby VHS tape.
There’s no doubt Sam Eng is a skater, a late-night roamer of dimly-lit spots and disciple to clean bolt landings. The mechanical vocabulary of Skate Story’s skateboarding is too measured and astute; the way our glassy demon protagonist pops his board, shifts his back foot to the right spot in the pocket, and floats as the board twirls and tweaks.
Few games capture the almost physics-defying, balletic beauty of a competent skateboarder in motion while also capturing the inherent fragility of trusting scratchy grip tape to keep you tethered to a few plies of compressed maple. The demon isn’t made of glass for nothing. There’s none of that launching fifty yards into the air to land on a distant ramp while stringing together half a dozen tricks here.
Hard lessons beautifully taught
What follows is, on the surface, an assured and competent skateboarding game. But, in reality, it’s a begrudging love letter, an allegory for the thorny relationship between skater and deck, of fraught, dissonant feelings. Near the tail end of Skate Story’s nine-chaptered narrative, ‘I hate skateboarding’ fills the screen in coarse, red typeface, repeatedly. Until, that is, our demon trickster pushes off again. There’s no other way.
Skateboarding is in many ways purgatory: few voluntary human pursuits are steeped in such thick, suffocating, humbling failure. You try and fail. Try and fail. Try. Fail. Fail. Fail. And then it happens. As the harsh governess that is perseverance relents, you succeed. That first inch-high ollie for the green tyro, a slappy fifty shove it out for the aging, aching fools like myself, or a flip tail slide on the Hollywood High 16 for the truly skilled and fearless. Skate Story gets it.
Cosmic half-pipe
Skating aside, Skate Story beams for its characters and world. Vertiginously cosmic scenes give way to frantic, linear corridors, then open up into generously freeform street plazas. A conical jobsworth plushy interrupts your sleep. A tortured writer, a pigeon pecking away at a laptop in a coffee shop, no less, needs letters. A subway train with squirming legs that’s like a New Yorker’s take on Totoro’s cat bus ferries you deeper into the underworld. Sharp humor gives way to harrowing sequences with genuine emotional depth.
Yet, Skate Story is succinct and cohesive in all its absurdity, partly thanks to the unique interplay of light, particles, and the almost crude, lo-fi imperfection of its memorable visuals, and partly due to its distinctive music and sound design. Skate Story sounds honest: the reverberation of a taped tail on concrete, the grisly rasp of grinds, and the noise-adjacent eroded static that pierces Skate Story’s more oppressive, haunting moments.
The music – oh what a wondrous thing. Provided by artist Blood Cultures, it’s expertly cued to feel almost nourishing in its synth-wave haze, thumping impact, and ethereal vocal layering. Do yourself a favor and play with headphones.
Indulgent in the right way
Yes, Skate Story is a surrealist take on the skateboarding game, the more artisanal, slightly (but also consciously) self-indulgent, and wavy counterpart to the gamified challenges, stunts, and arbitrary high-score hunting of EA’s Skate. However, should you let its undeniably weird charm wash over you, you’ll find a deeply personal game. Sam Eng’s, at times, bleak writing prods at something darker, as if Skate Story isn’t just an exercise in creativity, but also about a developer getting something heavy off their chest.
There’s an intimacy to Skate Story, and it’s all the better for it. Pause skating to scope out the environment. You’ll find what reads like intimate confessions etched in hellish font on vertical slabs. It’s rich with an alluring brand of ambiguity that does more showing than telling, leaving the door wide open for interpretation. And in the silent contract between player and developer, nothing feels more respectful than the space to come to your own conclusions.
Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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