Unique Style and Surreal Narrative Make ‘Skate Story’ a Skateboarding Game Like No Other [Review]

Sometimes you read a premise where every single word gets better as the sentence goes on. Skate Story, the new game from Sam Eng, is one of those premises. You play as a demon made of glass and pain who is trying to skate through the underworld in order to eat the moons that keep him from sleeping. As if that dynamite setup wasn’t enough to get my attention, every piece of footage I’ve seen of this leading up to release has been stunning, looking like nothing I would ever expect from a game with such a simple title. It’s been three years since the game’s reveal, and after several delays it’s finally here.

What’s unique about Skate Story, aside from the aforementioned premise, is that it’s not structured like any other skating game I’ve ever played before. You are occasionally dropped in a skate park with a score goal to meet, though it’s generally flavored as something other than not just ‘points,’ but most of the levels alternate between propulsive sections where you’re quickly moving through linear areas and more open areas where you complete small quests for the strange denizens of the underworld. To add variety, there are interesting boss fights thrown into the mix that utilize a unique ‘fighting’ mechanic. All these levels are framed by some truly gorgeous cutscenes that move forward the surreal and compelling narrative. There’s just enough going on in the six hour campaign, and it wisely wraps up before running out of steam.

I’m not an expert at skating games, I think the last one I played was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, so it did take me a while to get the hang of Skate Story. Despite the fact that it’s definitely not a realistic skating sim from a presentation standpoint, it doesn’t quite have the arcade-y feel of Tony Hawk. Your main suite of tricks is connected to the button combination you press before you initiate your jump, rather than adding different grabs and holds while in the air. The more complex maneuvers have more specific timing to pull them off perfectly, which keeps you from just spamming tricks carelessly. Like other skating games, you have reverts, manuals, and grinds that you can perform to help string together your various kickflips and ollies, allowing you to create combos that are finished by stomping your board down.

One thing I need to admit before really getting into it is that I never really got ‘good’ at Skate Story, and I don’t think it’s the game’s fault. I understood its mechanics, but I just didn’t have the coordination to pull off combos flawlessly. My timing would be a little off or I would forget which button combination did which trick, all problems with me and not the game. I would frequently miss grinds because they didn’t have the same snap-to-the-rail feeling you get when hitting the grind button in Tony Hawk. The level design was good enough that I could see the combo lines clearly, but I just wasn’t good enough to hit them.

Surprisingly, the best part is that it didn’t really matter in the long run. While good players will definitely be able to bust out huge, impressive combos that will put me to shame, the game didn’t demand that of me to progress. It’s very forgiving in its checkpointing, making sure that any time I wiped out or didn’t meet a score threshold I wouldn’t lose that much progress. There were specific sections that I crashed and burned on over and over, but it was never too frustrating and always felt great when I finally nailed it. Maybe this will make the game feel too easy for expert skating game players, but I think there’s enough depth to the mechanics that will be really satisfying for pros to master.

So what makes me come back over and over if I’m not that good at it? Every part of this game is finely tuned to make it feel good to play. There’s so many little stylish techniques this game uses to enhance even the simplest of actions. As you press A to start pushing yourself forward, the camera starts to creep in closer and get lower, almost focusing more on your board than on your character. A generous use of slow mo, hitstop, and camera shake puts an emphasis on every little trick, and stomping your board down at the end produces a powerful effect that you can feel the impact of. Maybe it’s good that I wasn’t the best at this game, because the most stylish thing you can do in the game is crash, sending your glass body tumbling and shattering as the camera tumbles with you. Game feel is such an important, but nebulous, thing to nail for a genre like this, and Skate Story does it exceptionally well.

The linear levels really benefited from this polish, turning what could be fairly routine obstacle courses into amazing audio-visual experiences. The spaces you barrel through have a wonderful mix of abstract and representational, with familiar things laid out in more surreal landscapes. The color palette is truly breathtaking, mostly consisting of monochromatic areas that are accented by pops of vibrant color. The visuals combine perfectly with an outstanding soundtrack that ranges from calm and meditative to menacingly pulsing, always in sync with the emotion it’s trying to convey. Each of these levels are broken into a series of stages with a gate at the end, and they each only last about 15 to 60 seconds. It reminded me of a mix between Thumper and Sayonara Wild Hearts, except your verbs are all skating related.

Most of the ten chapters in the game featured a hub world that’s one part skate park, one part location full of weirdos, and here you complete quests that move the story forward. If you would have asked me what type of quests would I be given for a game that’s set in hell with the main interaction method being skateboarding, I would have never in a million years come up with the combination of strange and mundane tasks that the game gives you. I had to collect ‘think pieces’ for floating philosopher head statues, track down a subway pass, and do the devil’s laundry, just to name a few. These sections always felt like great ways to break up the pace, giving you a more open area of the game to practice your skills between more intense levels.

Boss fights come in an interesting form, as they find a way to use skating as a combat mechanic. When you stomp down a combo, you do damage to enemies nearby, which makes for a neat change up to the standard skating game trick system. Now not only are you trying to keep a combo rolling for the sake of points, but you’re trying to end it in a specific spot that’s near a boss or in a red spotlight on the floor. Sometimes this did lead me to just flailing around doing very short combos in a small space and looking like a fool, but when this combat style is combined with one of the linear levels, it makes for a thrilling chase that has you concentrating on multiple things at once. This type of battle didn’t always work for me, but some of the encounters really clicked in a way that had me pumping my fist in excitement as I hit the final trick to finish off a weird creature.

Stringing this all together is a delightfully absurd story told through extremely effective and well-directed cutscenes. The same style that makes the gameplay shine comes through in the cinematics, creating a narrative that’s funny, weird, and actually pretty affecting by the end. There’s a great set of characters that populate a story about purpose, hope, and identity that’s told with such a perfect surrealist tone that you never know what to expect. It’s so refreshing to see something as grounded as skateboarding be used to tell such a unique story that I wish more games would take big wild swings when combining mechanics and mood.

Nothing is more creatively energizing to me than seeing a piece of work with a singular vision, and Skate Story is one of those games. Every single element, from the gameplay to the visuals to the soundscape, is dedicated to crafting a specific tone and feel, making for one of the most unique experiences of the year. Even if I didn’t fully grasp the gameplay in a way that I’m sure skating game experts will be able to, it’s undeniable to me that the game feel is exceptional. The brand of surrealism that it presents throughout its story is right up my alley, and my screenshots folder is full of wonderful lines of dialog that I wanted to immortalize forever.

For a while it felt like this game was going to vanish in development hell, but its combination of immaculate vibes and tight skating mechanics proved to be worth the wait.

Review code provided by publisher.

Skate Story is now available on PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam.