Skate Story recasts the score-focused, competitive nature of most skating games into a surreal, metaphysical adventure through Hell, sending players in search of a glassy skater’s soul. Along the way they’ll beat several moons into submission through kickflips and grinds, eating them all en route to an anticipated showdown with the devil, and also watch their skater explode into a million pieces whenever they seriously mess up a landing. Anybody disappointed that the Tony Hawk games stuck so close to reality and never fully explored the narrative possibilities afforded them by the video game medium should skate on in to Sam Eng’s new game; it’s the first skating game where the skater is a demon made, as Skate Story often reminds the player, of “glass and pain.”
Eng constructs a Hell that’s part urban nightscape, part solar system, and conversant with Dante, with the skater descending through city-like levels that are each home to a different moon (or, in one case, two moons). Despite their infernal aesthetic, these levels are instantly familiar to the skating game veteran; they act as a kind of corrupted version of the standard downtown level of a Tony Hawk game, complete with various goals that need to be accomplished before pushing on (in this case, into boss battles against those moons). Move through these levels by tapping one button to build up speed and another to do an ollie, and then reel off more complicated tricks by tapping one (or more) shoulder buttons before ollieing. Grinding’s as simple as ollieing onto rails or the edge of any raised surface, although it’s far more difficult in practice than that sounds, and the skater can also do manuals, reverts, and nollies. Every trick is scored, scores get higher when tricks are chained together into combos, and damage equal to the combo’s current score is inflicted upon enemies by hitting another button while performing a trick to slam the skater’s board down hard on the ground. It’s a different system than the Skate or Tony Hawk series, but anybody who’s ever grinded out hours in a skateboarding game should understand it immediately.
With the basic thrust of skating thus accounted for, Skate Story can direct the rest of its efforts towards its story, which makes the typical skating game look lazy, uninspired, and insufferably literal.
The story in most skating games is pretty simple: the player is skating. That’s it. Do tricks, earn points, win medals: keep moving forward. Constant forward motion is what skating’s about, after all. Even when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater would task players with the kind of business only possible in a video game—nobody’s grabbing giant glowing letters in the real world—it was still firmly set within the safe, comfortable expectations of competitive skating. Individual missions could veer into the absurd or fantastical, but those were momentary asides.
If it’s not clear yet, Skate Story is all fantasy. Very little of its absurd, dreamlike, frequently psychedelic journey is set in anything recognizable as the “real” world. It’s still about moving forward (or, perhaps, downward); as the game says after the player first learns to ollie, “the skater’s soul turned into pure momentum,” because, again, that is the true nature of skating. But by almost completely divorcing it from reality Eng obscures how similar Skate Story is, mechanically and structurally, to most skating games. By telling a story primarily interested in matters of the soul, even in a way that’s rarely all that serious, Skate Story is at least nominally weightier than a Tony Hawk game. And its gang of demons, surly skeletons, and deceptive moons (who, understandably, don’t want to be eaten), along with the skater’s ghost rabbit companion, are a memorable bunch.
It ultimately feels a bit hollow, though—driven at least as much by “wouldn’t it be cool if…” brainstorming than by the desire to make any kind of statement. Which is fine—skating games don’t need to saysomething. It’s all about the aesthetic, and that aesthetic is rad. Seriously: try to find a better vibe than blasting through quick burst cosmic corridors while chasing a ghostly moon to the restlessly distinctive music of Blood Cultures (who does much of the score, along with John Fio, and it sounds like listening to a shift by a college radio DJ with particularly wide-ranging and exquisite taste). Skate Story is a game about a glass demon eating moons in hell because the idea of a glass demon eating moons in hell is cool and sick and weird. Eng and Skate Story perfectly understand that skateboarding exists and will always be popular because it, too, is cool and sick. And although the sheer number of “cool” ideas stacked on top of each other threatens to collapse Skate Story in on itself, Eng is able to keep it all together—to keep it all moving forward, deeper into Hell, towards a date with the devil, always in tune with the true story of skating.
Skate Story was developed by Sam Eng / Snowhydra LLC and published by Devolver Digital. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available for PC.
