Skin Deep Review – System Snark

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The label “immersive simulation” might be misleading, since most video games aim to immerse players and simulate various aspects. However, the term has been a topic of discussion among creators and enthusiasts. Jokingly, I’ve referred to it as a game where you can flush toilets, considering its prevalence in titles like Prey, BioShock, and others that stand out in the genre. In essence, I view immersive sims as games offering multiple ways to solve puzzles, leaving the choice of solution up to the player. In this light, Skin Deep can be considered a prime example of an immersive simulation.

In the humorous sci-fi film “Skin Deep”, your character is Nina Pasadena, an Insurance Commando whose role involves rescuing cats that have been abducted by space pirates as long as they are insured. The mischievous group, known as The Numb Bunch, are causing a lot of trouble, taking control of numerous ships and keeping Nina occupied saving her covered feline clients. The plot setup might seem absurd, but it’s intentionally so. Unlike many other “im-sims”, “Skin Deep” is consistently amusing, with enemies providing witty quips as you sneak around different spaceships, and emails from rescued cats providing a comic relief between missions.

In the first-person perspective, Skin Deep presents challenging stages that seem endlessly varied and require strategic thinking, while also forcing you to think quickly when things don’t go as planned. Each mission involves rescuing trapped cats and avoiding or neutralizing adversaries, and there’s no single correct way to accomplish these tasks. A cat’s lockbox requires a key, which can be obtained by pickpocketing guards, reading memos, locating one somewhere, finding a Duper – a device that replicates items instantly when fired upon – and duplicating a distant key, or through other unspecified means.

Traversing each stage presents similar difficulties and satisfactions. These conquered vessels are usually teeming with guards, surveillance cameras, turrets, and sealed corridors, making every level a covert operation from the start. Since you’re never invited, it’s essential to avoid detection at all costs or face the penalties of being discovered. Nina is too fragile to take much damage and lacks the necessary equipment for a run-and-gun approach; however, as I became more adept with my skills and knowledge of the environment, I found myself coming up with ideas and completing stages more swiftly.

Shortcuts like airlocks, vents, trash chutes, and windows are initially inaccessible at the start of a mission, but as you progress deeper into the game, they become useful alternatives. However, each action requires careful, sometimes complicated steps to execute. As I became more familiar with the game’s language and gained confidence, I found myself using these shortcuts more frequently, mission by mission. I learned that I could find unlock codes on sticky notes, tablets, or printouts scattered around. If I couldn’t find the necessary blue or yellow keys, I knew I could often find a vent unlock code to gain access to locked rooms instead.

When I occasionally fell or made mistakes, those were actually the most thrilling experiences for me, as after meticulously planning only to mess up Plan A, I’d be left with scant moments to swiftly devise an alternative plan B. Just like Hitman’s Agent 47 who tosses a hammer at the wrong target and then has to improvise his way out of a room filled with wealthy socialites, it is in those chaotic intervals between perfectly timed, flawlessly executed triumphs where true resilience truly sparkles, and Skin Deep adores such chaos.

In Skin Deep, it’s not only your actions shaping the gameplay, but also the enemies’ reactions to you. Sometimes their responses create intriguing patterns that you can capitalize on later. A particularly thrilling instance of this happened when I unintentionally triggered an alarm, causing the guards to go on high alert. They spotted me hiding in a vent, so they decided to cleanse it with a powerful shockwave across the entire facility. I managed to slip out of the vents undetected before the cleansing took place, but because they believed I had been killed by the blast, the guards resumed their normal patrols. This actually worked in my favor – since they were back to their regular routines, I was able to skip the step of deliberately lowering the alert level, either by sneaking into the Bridge room or by impersonating a guard over the walkie-talkie, reassuring the pirates that everything is under control.

In this game, there aren’t any abilities to level up or equipment to buy as you progress. Instead, advancement comes from learning your strengths and anticipating the game world’s responses to your actions. As my confidence grew, I found myself relying more on strategic elimination of enemies. For instance, I might swipe a walkie-talkie, smash it against a hard surface to make it spark, then toss it far away so that it hits an oil line just when an enemy is nearby. *Boom*. Alternatively, I could locate a Duper and a Hack Grenade, duplicate them twice, and then hack the ship’s guns so they’d coordinate against a heavily armored foe – one neither I nor a single gun could easily defeat on my own.

In situations where Hack Grenades weren’t available, I’d occasionally destroy cameras by simply tossing books or cat toys at them until they shattered. Additionally, I could make guards susceptible by causing them to slip on a banana peel or by pepper-spraying them, resulting in a sneezing fit. Just like the most enjoyable simulation games, Skin Deep consistently leaves you wondering, “What does this button do?

In this game, when you defeat an enemy, it’s not just about draining their health; their head also detaches and floats around as a capsule-shaped object, similar to a gacha toy. If you don’t handle these heads, they’ll eventually make their way back to the battlefield. This requires not only knowing how to permanently eliminate enemies but also saving space in your inventory for these “Skullsavers” until you can discard them into a waste bin or fling them into the void. Throughout this process, these heads will tease you from your inventory and speak muffled words if you haven’t equipped them actively.

In every situation, there’s a consequence, and as each stage introduces new complexities to this gadget-and-villain environment, the whole game duration is necessary to fully grasp it all. However, as time progressed, I often resorted to my familiar strategies, so even though the game evolves its concepts over time, established techniques like those mentioned earlier became routine because of their consistency. This forced me to intentionally opt for new approaches at times, such as when I ceased searching for the secret cat keys and instead started stealing them from the enemies’ belts – it was riskier, but also faster, so if I felt I understood their movement patterns, I could safely pickpocket them.

In any level, a feeling of comfort and security often delayed the final phase due to the sudden appearance of heavily armed backup troops once all the cats were rescued. To progress at that stage, you could either eliminate them all (the most challenging choice given their toughness), or discover the Ship Authority Key, seize control of their arrival pod, transforming it into your exit vehicle. From a distance, you can scan enemies like reading notes, so this essentially boiled down to identifying which enemy had the key and devising a plan to obtain it from them.

This wasn’t typically straightforward, but considering the flexible nature of the levels prior to this point, it seemed like a creative impasse was building up; my approach to acquiring the key would adapt, but I never seriously considered using lethal force as my primary solution due to its increased difficulty.

As a fan, I must admit that there were moments when the game felt a tad repetitive, but the humor kept me hooked throughout. Despite its vibrant world being intentionally over-the-top with humor, boasting cats as cubic character models seemingly constructed in a rush, the visuals not being the focus of the creators’ brilliance, the jokes were surprisingly subtle. In between missions, I found myself engaged in lighthearted exchanges with rescued cats and other characters via email, discussions that were often unrelated to the main storyline. For instance, I had to gently decline a cat’s restaurant grand opening invitation or help another cat plan a cross-species skateboarding showcase.

Stealing walkie-talkies to deceive guards was always amusing, especially when Nina adopted a gruff space pirate voice, even funnier when her performance was compromised due to injuries she sustained, and the most hilarious moment of all was when the pirates still fell for her act despite its obvious flaws.

The game can survive without these elements, but they significantly enhance its overall feel. I appreciate many games in this genre with a darker tone, but Skin Deep offers a refreshing change by introducing a unique color scheme, both literally and symbolically, to the immersive sims. There doesn’t seem to be any deep social critique at its core. Instead, it appears that the developers simply found the concept amusing. And yes, it is amusing to play as an assassin-trained “Insurance Commando” who is revived from cryosleep whenever space pirates steal a ship filled with cat technicians. So, try not to overanalyze it.

Skin Deep doesn’t completely reinvent the concept of immersive games, but instead, it revamps the layout design principles that gamers have loved for years, tailoring them to its vibrant, quirkier-than-usual setting. Frequently, the optimal paths to victory can become too predictable and make spaceships with various shapes the backdrop for familiar endings, but more often than not, it’s a game of smart moves and unexpected responses. It ticks all the boxes of an exceptional immersive game, where each level is like a puzzle box, and you possess multiple keys to unraveling its secrets. And yes, you can flush the toilets.

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2025-04-28 16:40