There are a lot of skateboarding games out there, and I feel like I've played most of them. Some of them are majestic. Some don't. The Simpsons Skateboarding was a real flop. Tony Hawk: The ride was excruciatingly painful. This year's Skate is a microtransaction hellscape.
Enter Skate Story. Like the last examples, this is also a journey into the hell of skateboarding and learning in pain. In this case, however, this is the whole point of this extremely peculiar journey through destruction on a piece of seven-layer material. I wasn't Always on board due to the sheer and utter weirdness of Skate Story's wider adventure, but there's no doubt that developer Sam Eng has successfully married it with a robust and accessible set of skateboarding mechanics – and it certainly makes for a memorable skateboarding game unlike any I've ever played.
Skate Story is a bit of a difficult game to describe, if only because trying to even discuss the plot sounds like you're making it up on the spot. The point is that you are a demon made of glass and pain, locked in hell. More precisely, it is called the Underworld, but the Devil is here anyway. I know this because I have his pants.
A deal comes from the Devil. That is, you can be free under one condition: you find a way to roll, grind and manually get to the Moon – and eat this. For some reason.
Are you still following? Because I haven't even gotten to frog barista yet. Or a subway train with legs.
I hesitate to say anything more for fear of spoiling any particularly unusual events along the way, so keep in mind that Skate Story is an incredibly strange journey through a bizarre underground world. To be frank, it's not Really what I'm usually looking for. I mean, the stories I like usually feature big guys causing trouble in small towns, resentful killers, or fighter jets on the covers. So I'm more David Leitch than David Lynch, if that makes sense. However, Skate Story won me over in many ways. There were definitely moments where I found myself a little numb to the weirdness because of how offbeat it can be at times, but overall I admired the commitment to its surreal vision.
His story is told through text that you can read at your own pace. There's no voice acting or voiceover – and there's an argument to be made that it could have benefited from some gravitas from some baritone narration in the vein of The Stanley Parable or Bastion – but Skate Story's beautifully polished soundtrack means there's still plenty to listen to. The music, produced by New Jersey-based band Blood Cultures, is a generous blend of the band's experimental electro-pop sound, and varies in tempo and intensity depending on the locations and the pacing of the levels. This kind of music is also outside of my usual wheelhouse, but nonetheless, I found it extremely catchy and catchy, and it fits Skate Story perfectly. It perfectly complements the abstract environment of The Underworld and the atmosphere of its eternal night.
Don't be fooled by Skate Story's grainy, low-quality look; it's one of the most attractive and creative games I've played in a while. His psychedelic vision of a neon underworld combines jagged forests of thorns with the broken slabs of ancient architecture and twisted New York City neighborhoods with carpets of stars. Watching this wild world refract through a sneaker-wearing demon made entirely of glass is certainly quite something.
Pain in the glass
The controls aren't immediately intuitive because they're noticeably different from the approach used in the dedicated figure skating sports games many of us are familiar with. That is, in Skate Story there are no tricks that allow you to click the analog stick, like in the Skate series (or both analog sticks, as is the case with something like Session). It's more like playing something like Tony Hawk, just imagine if someone remapped all the buttons.
Basic tricks are activated by a combination of a shoulder button or trigger plus a face button, and landing occurs when you jump up and land appropriately on a rail or ledge. Many other, increasingly complex tricks are doled out and taught to us as the story unfolds over the course of approximately six hours. It's certainly not a revolutionary approach, but it's a smart one because constantly learning new tricks keeps things fresh. The learning curve was moderate as I tried to accumulate decades of THPS muscle memory to learn Skate Story's own specific trick system, but it didn't take long to get the hang of it.
Check out these skateboarding video games
Check out these skateboarding video games
It's all very solid and weighty, which I like, and the stunts look great in motion thanks to the low-slung camera that falls to the ground like a physical object every time you jump out and get smashed to pieces. I love the feel of powerslides, and I love the slow motion endings that reward us for our successes. When it comes to atmosphere, Skate Story succeeds.
To perform tricks, there is a synchronization mechanism that results in different jump heights, which is illustrated by the pattern on the screen (different shape for each trick). Depending on your skater's speed, the marker will track the pattern slowly or quickly – and there's a sweet spot for achieving maximum height – but I have to admit I usually paid little attention to this. On default settings, Skate Story never required careful timing to complete levels and defeat bosses. This suits me quite well, but the fact that you Maybe just spamming a bunch of the craziest looking segments might seem a little trivial to anyone looking for a more complex challenge.
Tony Hawk's Underworld
Boss battles are fun, and to win these encounters you need to create combos and stomp them inside the marked area. These can be eliminated with a simple button press, but there's certainly room to be much more careful with your trick selection and timing if you so choose (and you'll admittedly rack up better combos and deal more damage – and faster – if you do). There are also some small and fun sandbox style levels to travel through for different purposes, but some of these challenges do become frustratingly trivial. For example, one mission that required me to collect a set of floating letters sounded like a nice homage to Skate Story's ancestors, but most of them just floated at ground level, turning what could have been a brief but fun challenge into a basic quest of finding items around the map and back again.
My favorite parts of Skate Story, however, were the high-speed segments where you have to rush from a spawn point to an ethereal exit door – like some kind of haunted hill bomb. The music ramps up for these high-speed bursts, and I love the fast-paced, trial-and-error nature of them as your fragile demon shatters into pieces and you instantly get hit again. I always felt a slight pang of regret when I reached the end of these runs, and I wish there were a few more.
