Nina Pasadena is the best at what she does. And what she does is rescue cats. From pirates. In space. That’s right, she can take out a baddie by throwing a banana peel on the floor, set off an explosion using hand sanitizer, and sneak on and off spaceships through trash chutes, as long as she doesn’t mind risking getting so smelly it lets her foes know exactly where she is. Nina’s slapstick adventure is silly and absurd, but it’s also a satisfying challenge that fans of immersive sims like Dishonored and Prey shouldn’t overlook.
Blendo Games is best known for strange, smart games like Quadrilateral Cowboy and Thirty Flights of Loving. The developer’s penchant for blocky characters and gloriously low-tech spy tools are still on display in its newest release, Skin Deep, the most action-forward experience it’s ever produced. In Skin Deep, insurance operative Nina Pasadena is tasked with saving the employees of MiaoCorp (all of whom are surprisingly square-shaped cats) from a series of spaceships being hijacked by the Numb Bunch pirate gang. That means hacking systems, sneaking through vents, and otherwise avoiding being seen, or finding clever ways to make sure anyone who spots you finds themselves floating in space before they can get the drop on you.
Compared to other immersive sims, Skin Deep is a wacky, lighthearted affair, and it starts with a handful of simple, approachable tutorial missions. While it stays on the easier side of the genre, it starts revealing its true depth after these tutorials conclude in one of the best late title drops I’ve ever seen in a game. Nina is no soldier; she goes down pretty easily in a straightforward fight, though she’s helpfully equipped with an auto-defibrillator that gives you a second chance if you fall in combat. Ideally, it never comes to the point of a fair fight in the first place, and Skin Deep’s challenge comes from avoiding detection.
Your goal in each level is to free the ship’s captive cat crew after either finding the keys to their cells scattered around the ship or pickpocketing them from guards. At the start of each stage, you’re almost almost reined in by locked doors, sealed-off vents, and hacked ship systems that you’ll need to slowly restore to free the crew.
Skin Deep excels at making this repeated loop satisfying through the sheer variety of methods to complete your mission. One of my favorite ways, when possible, is to abandon the ship’s corridors entirely by jumping out an airlock (Nina has a third lung, we’re told, so she can breathe in space with no problem), then breaking a window from the outside to vent everyone inside out into the cosmos. Equally satisfying is creating a flammable gas cloud with certain objects, then baiting enemies into shooting you and igniting the cloud around themselves. Of course, that triggers one of Skin Deep’s most ingenious obstacles — the fact that enemies are equipped with devices that pop their heads off and respawn them later. To get around that, you can chuck their heads into space, but until you do, they’ll shout out from your inventory, alerting their fellow pirates to your location.
You can also go fully stealth, using sound to distract guards, sticking to the shadows, and stealing a radio to cancel combat alerts if you are spotted. Most of Skin Deep’s levels are fairly small, but their loops connect to each other through a web of vents and ziplines that makes them much more satisfying to explore than they might first appear. That also means there are plenty of escape routes when you need them.
The best part about Skin Deep’s levels, though, is their variety. After a few standard sci-fi spaceships, you’ll find yourself aboard a floating library, a post office, and even a restaurant, all with their own unique gimmicks on top of all the systems you already have to interact with. Eventually the sameness of freeing cats and using pepper to stun guards by making them sneeze does start to weigh Skin Deep down, but the prospect of seeing what clever twist was just around the corner kept me playing nonetheless.
The dense, interlocking systems and challenging stealth of immersive sims can make them a tough genre to get into. Skin Deep is certainly tough at times, but it still might be the most approachable immersive sim I’ve ever played, with adjustable difficulty options, a wealth of viable tactics in any situation, and a screwball sensibility that keeps the tension of outrunning space pirates from becoming too taxing. Even if immersive sims aren’t usually your thing, Skin Deep’s satisfying puzzle box levels and Blendo Games’ signature charm might still win you over as much as they did for me.
