There are objects in space that revolve around each other for so long and at such majestic speed that when they both eventually reach the same point, they do not collide with some terrible explosion. Instead, they simply touch. They are grazing. They merge. Everything is very gentle. And then, over time, the two objects become one.
That's kind of how I feel about Blendo Games, Brandon Chang's studio, and immersive simulations. This is a genre that takes things slowly, enjoying the atmosphere, reading notes and emails, looking through boxes, and then choosing your approach forward from the many potential paths laid out through the environment.
For years, we Blendo watchers have felt that Chang has a really good immersive simulator. Games like Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving pretend to be immersive simulators, but they're actually linear, cinematic games that rise above other games with similar ambitions because Chang seems to truly understand the cinema he's playing with. There's a chase at the end of Gravity Bone that includes Road Runner, Midnight Run, Raising Arizona, and the best bits of Thomas Pynchon combined. In Thirty Flights there is a party as dreamy as anything the French, the silent greats, or the silent French have ever dreamed up. And the jump cuts! You have never seen such jumps.
There's also Quadri Lateral Cowboy, which takes Blendo a lot closer to making a game where you have choices and can screw things up the right way. It's a beautiful thing, but it's also a game about hacking, and hacking comes to dominate my memories of the experience. A great game, but not exactly an exciting simulator.
I wrote about this in my review Deep skin earlier this year, but I'm coming back to it again because as time goes on I think that, at least for me, it's the purest pleasure Skin Deep has to offer. I've been watching this designer and this genre come closer together for over a decade. I watched them circle, build their orbits, and now, finally, they became one.
And what they have become. When it comes to video games, Skin Deep is Deux Ex with a little bit of Die Hard, a little bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a little bit of Splinter Cell Conviction and a dozen other things I can't remember right now. But it's also 100 percent Blendo. This is that rare type of studio that is able to translate its inspiration into creative choices. Deep cuts! Condemnation of Splinter Cell, ff! In 2025!?
You play as some sort of badass insurance guy who is sent into deep space to contact plundering ships. It's stealth because you're better off taking out enemies without being noticed, but it's also Road Runner stealth because you use bananas to confuse enemies and then their heads come off and you have to flush them down the toilet before they regrow.
I could go on with examples: the pepper you can spray, the fact that you can ride stunned enemies and ram them into walls, the fact that one level is a library and the next will be an observatory, the fact that you save cats and pull glass out of your feet to heal, and make radio calls to avoid giving yourself away. But the point is that this is a compact immersive simulator. Each level gives you a few enemies, some familiar toys to destroy, and plenty of new elements that come from the detailing of the environments themselves. You read notes, emails, magazines, and all that stuff to get a sense of where you are and how things work. But you also read them because they are beautifully written, characterful, and convey a sense of a world that is so rich and so carefully crafted that the developer only needs to give you parts of it to make you enjoy it.
Essentially, it's a virtuous circle of sorts: Blendo stuff flows into the immersive simulator, giving you unusual locations and strange opportunities, and immersive simulator stuff feeds back into the Blendo stuff, encouraging the developer to flesh out the environment and write little letters to the audience that are filled with lore, as well as hints and tips and all that jazz.
And the feeling of everything is that it is all so harmonious. It just fits. Skin Deep is the game that Blendo should have made, and it's a game that many of us have seen in all of the developer's other games, from oddities like Flotilla to outright bangers like Gravity Bone.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Brandon Chang about a magazine article and was pleased to learn that he had such a comfortable budget for Skin Deep that he could work with collaborators. And being the decent guy he is, he went so far as to give each game's level designer credit at the start of their particular mission. Of course, all games should do things like this, but it's still nice to see when someone decides to do it.
What struck me most about this is that despite having all these voices in the game, all these hands in the code, at its core it is still a Blendo connection. One of the great things about games is seeing a signature that stays the same from one game to the next: for example, the game Arkham likes to dramatize the approach to a boss fight, or how the material physics from the game Pixeljunk appeared in Pikmin games because Nintendo hired the person who made them.
And with Skin Deep, the feeling of reading familiar handwriting is everywhere. These are the ideas and influences I've spent two decades exploring. And they're richer, with new material added to them, and filled with other people's work, but it's also all clearer to analyze than ever before. What a game.
This article is part of our final series, Games of 2025, where we highlight great moments, great games, and our personal favorites of the year. You can read more in our Hub “Games 2025”. Thanks for reading and happy holidays!
