When you think of an immersive sim – games like Deus Ex, System Shock, Dishonored, Thief, etc. – comedy isn’t usually the first thing to come to mind. These are systems-driven games that are based around player expression in how they want to tackle any given problem. Often that boils down to stealth versus an all-out assault, but there’s plenty of little things that give you room to play around and let you be a little pest for the poor souls placed between you and whatever it is you’re after. Maybe you terrorize them, slowly picking off foes one at a time luring them into carefully laid traps. Or perhaps you decide to just be annoying using distractions and disrupting whatever it is they need to do their jobs without ever actually being seen.
But Skin Deep is more interested in the simple things. Like making someone slip on a banana peel or a bar of soap, or throwing some ground pepper in their face to cause a sneezing fit. You know, the classics of slapstick. Skin Deep from Blendo Games is an immersive sim that thrives on the comedic potential of the genre. It takes the best parts of the immersive sim form – the intricate levels, the open-ended design, the systemic interactions – and puts them into a series of tightly focused levels. The sheer degree of freedom you have to tackle any situation allows for plenty of clever ideas and careful planning, every level a veritable playground of opportunities to test the limits of the possibility space, placing just enough restriction to force the kind of creative thinking Skin Deep rewards. It’s also genuinely funny, both in terms of its writing and the act of play itself.
You play as Nina Pasadena, an insurance commando employed by MIAOCorp. Her job is to be a stowaway on ships, tucked away in cryostasis until the silent alarm is tripped, whereupon she’s immediately thawed and deployed for action to dispatch the intruders and get the crew to safety. On an otherwise routine job, a particularly notorious group of space Pirates called the Numb Bunch take over the ship, not in pursuit of the cargo or the crew, but to take out Nina specifically. What for, she couldn’t possibly guess. She’s made a lot of enemies over the years, so there’s no lack of people who have it out for her. Except the person who wants Nina dead is… Nina – her clone, to be precise, a remnant from her past come back to haunt her with an army of pirates in tow.
The goal of each mission is the same: rescue the crew and either extract or remove all the enemies from the ship. For the first few missions you can just grab the crew and go. But with each new mission, there’s more steps and complications added. Extraction soon requires you to summon an escape pod for the cats and then acquire a key to steal a pirate vessel that brings reinforcements in to make your own escape. You can just take out all the pirates as well, but doing so requires some creativity on your part since sneaking behind them and hitting them with a blunt object or putting them in a choke hold isn’t an option. You specifically have to deplete their health to detach their heads and dispose of them. The pirates are equipped with gear that allows them to subvert death by detaching their heads from their bodies and transports them to a regeneration pad to get a new body. To stop this you have to intercept their heads and throw them into space, whether that’s via the airlock or a broken window, tossing them into the trash, or flushing them down the toilet. Whatever’s closest, really.
You’re required to use your surroundings and see what opportunities are available. As you start each mission with zero gear to speak of, you have to use what you can find on the ship. Everything has a use. Most items make their function clear upon examination, the warning labels stating with exact precision the kinds of actions you can take with them. An electrical conduit works as a simple tool to club targets or break windows with, for instance, but starts to spark upon impact, making it capable of starting fires should it come into contact with any flammable substance or aerosol but only while it’s sparking. Screws can puncture pipes and even deal some damage to security cameras. Proper weapons like guns and grenades sometimes make an appearance, but are exceedingly rare, so you have to learn how to make the best with what you’ve got.
Often in these sorts of games, I’m able to find a consistent, repeatable method of problem solving and just rely on that until the credits roll. It’s as much a strength of the genre as it is a weakness, as it ultimately railroads you down a very narrow set of interactions because you’re incentivized to stick to a certain playstyle. Skin Deep, by making each level be self-contained, by not having any sort of character progression or skill tree or what have you, creates the ideal circumstances for play in this genre. You’re encouraged to just try shit and see what happens. You can try to play it safe and rely purely on stealth and subterfuge, but the game is good at throwing a wrench into your plans and forcing you to change tactics.
In the early levels, I was focused on trying to eliminate the guards altogether so I could easily roam about the ship. All I needed was some way to stun them so I could ram their heads into whatever was closest. One of my favorite tricks was to break the pressure valves on the airlock doors to force them open (or break a window instead) and remove every pirate in the room instantly. That fell apart once elites, stronger pirates who are equipped with gear that keeps them safe during an airlock breach and who you cannot climb aboard and ram into the walls as you please, started becoming far more common. I swapped to being more evasive, trying to find moments where I could catch them in an explosion or at least leave them distracted long enough that I could pickpocket their gear, but that led to the problem of having more pirates to deal with during the extraction phase. The escape pod for the crew usually brings some firearms, but there’s often more guards than there are bullets to go around, so I’d have to pick my targets carefully if I went that route.
Sometimes the ships have unique opportunities. On a mining vessel, one pirate’s patrol put them right in the line of fire of a drilling laser, which not only let me get rid of one of the guards, but also drew another to investigate the noise, which also put them right in the line of fire. One particularly fun moment involved pickpocketing a keycard and replacing it with a book. Since this was a library, there were plenty of books strewn about in the aftermath of the invasion. There are also checkpoints you aren’t supposed to pass through while holding a book lest you get electrocuted. So of course the guard I stole the keycard from passed through one and immediately got a nasty shock.
This is where Skin Deep is at its best. It revels in the playfulness of the immersive sim form and the ways it is inherently comedic, but it also shines in the ways you have to improvise in a difficult situation. It naturally leads to funny outcomes more often than not, but it doesn’t undercut the tension of being outnumbered and outgunned. It rewards you actively seeking out creative solutions and just poking and prodding around levels. Sometimes it leads to actual uses like throwing on some music at a radio station to drown out all other noise. Literally all other sound is muted, meaning you can make as much noise as you want and not be heard. The best part, each of the discs you can find has a different track on them. Or on a ship that’s a drive-through restaurant you can spend time filling orders for customers coming through because business doesn’t stop even when pirates have taken over the ship. In exchange, you get items and sometimes weapons you can use.
It’s the little things that tie these games together and Skin Deep doesn’t miss a beat. Immersive sims are a very playful genre by nature and the lengths Skin Deep goes to lean all the way in on those aspects is fantastic. Every level is filled to the brim of potential for hijinks and it’s a riot to watch it all play out every time. Comedy is difficult to pull off in games, but Skin Deep is able to do so effortlessly and is all the better for it.
Callum Rakestraw (he/him) is the Reviews Editor at Entertainium. You can find him on Bluesky, Mastodon, and his blog.
