Die Hard: A Space Odyssey.
There’s a library in Skin Deep that really isn’t screwing around.
Check enough books backin, meanwhile, and you’ll be rewarded with a gun.
I suspect this place is a librarian’s dream.
Then there are the books themselves.
Books, as anyone who’s ever moved house will know, are heavy things.
Maybe you’ve got the option to lurk up high and bean your enemies with them?
But, hey, what about those electrical gates?
Maybe you might sneak a book into the pocket of a passing raider and watch as they get zapped?
But Gravity Bone was a cinematic toy that pretended to be an immersive sim.
This is not a criticism.
But they weren’t immersive sims.
Oh, maybe it was?
Quadrilateral Cowboy was a stealthy puzzle game about coding.
Skin Deep, though, is a perfect genre piece.
It’s immersive and it simulates.
All the elements are just right.
You know there will be crew to rescue.
Another - my favourite - is a deep space observatory.
Flush them down a toilet.
Vent them into space.
Chuck them into the trash.
Aren’t - as Melville once said - aren’t there too many heads in the world?
(Bananas, incidentally, are wildly OP in Skin Deep.)
This is Skin Deep at its best.
Maybe you slip on the banana peel you just placed for a guard.
Maybe you knock them into a washing machine and you all slip up in the foam.
Maybe you’ve broken something nearby and the glass gets stuck in your foot, Die Hard-style.
This kind of thing makes the carefully pokey worlds of Skin Deep feel gigantic.
Things can always go wrong, and one mistake can chain into another and another.
And there’s simulation helping all this to reach its greatest extent.
Creep through vents, sure, but watch the dust in the air, because you might sneeze.
Complicating all this further are puzzle elements that see you gradually unlocking each environment you move through.
Shotguns: you gotta reload, but you also need to rack new shells in.
Signalling the rescue pod when you’ve moved outside the ship and are ready to send your cats home?
Killed in a mission?
We often talk of genre or mechanics, of series or influences.
I’ve done all that today.
But maybe we should talk .
Lots of developers can do voices, but a handful have a voice.
Skin Deep is an immersive sim.
It riffs enthusiastically on everything from Die Hard to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Review code for Skin Deep was provided by the publisher.
