You might wonder how a demon making a pact with the Devil to eat the Moon translates into a game about skateboarding. I’ve played Skate Story and I still can’t entirely answer that. What I can tell you is that Skate Story is a beautiful, surreal, poetic journey through the underworld, emblazoned with neon, crystal, and hellfire. It is unlike anything else you’ve played this year, and about as far from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as it’s possible to be, while sharing the same basic mechanics. Somehow, it works. Perhaps developer Sam Eng might also have made a pact of their own.
You are the Skater, a demon who’s attempting to win back his soul from the Devil by eating the Moon. You’re granted a skateboard to achieve this mammoth task because the moon is a very long way away. This being a pact with the Devil, it’s not without downsides: not only does he lease the Skater’s soul back to him, but he also turns the Skater to glass, which, as you may be aware, is not an ideal material for a skateboarder to be made of.
Still, the Devil gets more than he bargains for with the Skater, who descends on his skateboard through the seven levels of hell, freeing souls, exploring trash bags, and giving philosophers soft drinks, all the while firing off kickflips, ollies and grinds. He remains unfazed by the surreal sights and sounds he encounters, and the pervasive air of normality in this unreal setting lends Skate Story some seriously off-kilter vibes. It is, in a word, brilliant.
It’s also utterly beautiful. Shadowy half-spaces loom out of the darkness, ledges, slopes and kerbs beckoning to you while neon sparks and stars glimmer all around and the blazing red of hellfire pens you in on both sides. The glass skater’s crystalline body refracts the light, glimmering beneath the infernal contract he wears as a scarf, while the denizens of the underworld are monstrous, beguiling and unique. Despite the danger and fragility of your situation, these are welcoming spaces, asking you to skate every surface possible, while helping those that you can.
This is still skateboarding. You steadily gain many of the moves you’d expect, starting from a simple ollie, and ramping up into kickflips, manuals and 360 Pop Shuvits. At times, you’re racing through the underworld, speeding along while avoiding hellish obstacles; at others, you’re using those moves to build up a combo to attack a supernatural foe. Sometimes, it could almost be Session, Skate or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but then a glowing rabbit talks to you, or you ram into a ledge and shatter into a million pieces. It’s still a more fundamental and realistic vision of skateboarding than many other games, an odd juxtaposition with the unreal setting.
Skate Story’s writing and overarching storytelling is often obtuse, but it never fails to be intriguing and unusually captivating. Conversations and asides are oddly mundane, at odds with the otherworldly characters speaking them, while story sections appear as lines of poetry. As a metaphor for perseverance, punishment and putting yourself back together, Skate Story just works. Some games might simply have used the story as a framework to hang the incredible visuals from, but Sam Eng has created something thoroughly unique across the board. It gives Skate Story an incredible, arresting atmosphere, and one which I immediately wanted to dive back into.
Everything has an 80s, VHS sci-fi horror vibe, and the incredible soundtrack from Blood Cultures brings a dark blend of synth, pop, electronica, hip-hop and jazz, ethereal tones and thumping beats enhancing the off-kilter, otherworldly sensations even further. It easily stands as a late entrant in the soundtrack of the year conversation, and brings the game full circle, marrying skateboarding and underground music in a brilliantly effective way.
