There’s a library in Skin Deep that really isn’t screwing around. It’s in outer space for one thing, and for another its calm, ordered stacks are protected by fidgety electrical gates that zap you if you’re trying to move through them with a book you haven’t checked out. Check enough books back , meanwhile, and you’ll be rewarded with a gun. I suspect this place is a librarian’s dream.
Skin Deep reviewPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveDeveloper: Blendo GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 30th April on Steam.
Because Skin Deep is an action game, this library on a space ship has been overtaken by raiders who now patrol its corridors and have taken its original crew hostage. Your job, as a sort of insurance assassin, is to turn up and get rid of the raiders, and in this task the library itself can be both accomplice or annoyance. That gun will help, for starters, but how can you collect enough books to earn it when there are patrols everywhere and security cameras watching for you from every corner? Then there are the books themselves. Books, as anyone who’s ever moved house will know, are heavy things. Maybe you can lurk up high and bean your enemies with them? But, hey, what about those electrical gates? Maybe you can sneak a book into the pocket of a passing raider and watch as they get zapped?
To whit: Skin Deep is not just an action game, it’s an immersive sim, those magical games made of emails and stray notes, of patrols routes to insinuate yourself into and multiple paths through a level to be teased out and exploited. These are stealth games, but only in the way that a cat is stealthy as it tracks a mouse. Really, the stealth is just another way of toying with the foe, arranging the environment, waiting for the best of all possible moments to strike.
And Brendon Chung, of Skin Deep developer Blendo Games, has been threatening to make an immersive sim since his players first descended in that elevator, down, down into the mingling throng of a bizarre clifftop cocktail party at the start of his ingenious short game Gravity Bone. Gravity Bone players were at the cocktail party to dress up as a waiter, locate a very specific guest, and then poison them. This is a moment that receives a callback so good in Skin Deep that I actually stood up and cheered – and then, embarrassed, had to pretend to everyone nearby that I was just choking.