Skate Story review

It's one of my life's greatest shames that I do not and cannot skate.

There's a simple reason: I never trusted I could do it without exploding my whole skeleton. Nevertheless I behold the skateboard with a kind of talismanic reverence. It's an implement that grants a different relationship with our earthly geometry. Skating is an almost occultic discipline, its practitioners defying worldly convention to dabble in transcendent matters of slope, rotation, and bodily contortion.

Skate Story takes that to an extreme. If Dante Alighieri had known that skateboarding could be a weapon of metaphysical rebellion against hell and reality itself, The Inferno would also have followed a "demon made of glass and pain" who's entered into a contract with the Devil to eat the moon in exchange for their soul.

Skate Story is one of the best-sounding and most stylish games I've played in recent memory. It's an esoteric art installation and interactive concept album navigated via powerslide and axel grind: a mesmerizing ode to the miserable occupants of an uncannily familiar underworld. It's grungy; it's grimy; it's almost certainly intolerable if the word "postmodern" sets you on edge. But my god does it make landing a clean heelflip feel very, very good.

Thus, the skateboard

Skate Story's melding of lo-fi assets and post-processing mastery is a flex in and of itself. The Skater is a literal mass of polygons in skate shoes, but their glass pane skin is beautiful to watch in motion as it refracts and reflects light while I grind Hell's curbs. Skating has immaculate animation and visual feedback: Simulated camera shake made for a delicious impact whenever I landed a trick after gaining big air.

Those flourishes only sing because the skating itself is tightly crafted. You prime tricks with button combinations before you pop into the air, so rather than cramming as many tricks as possible into the available airtime, building score is an art of timing and tempo.

It's been more than five years since Skate Story's announcement, and I could feel how much of that time was invested in capturing the weight and momentum of The Skater and their board. As additional techniques like spins and reverts were introduced, I loved how skating clean lines became a moving meditation of managing speed, orientation, and combo accumulation.

The skating is a satisfying ritual—but it's also a means of metaphysical combat. Throughout Skate Story, I confronted demons, celestial objects, and Hell's own existential fabric, transmuting the score from my skate combos into damage. In these sequences Skate Story becomes an even more vibrant spectacle: Hell's skate spots bloom into kaleidoscopes of demonic psychedelia. Time slows as I stomp ollies to punctuate trick combos in eruptions of glittering demonlight, as though reality itself is warped by the combined force of my righteous kickflips. I regularly kept boss encounters going longer than necessary, just to keep watching the show.

I was initially frustrated with Skate Story's score mechanics until I internalized I wasn't playing Tony Hawk. It took awhile to realize I wouldn't completely lose my combo points if I lagged too long between tricks; it starts gradually bleeding away instead, but performing another trick staunched the flow and let me pick my combo back up.

When I was afraid of not dealing enough damage before boss timers expired, I was frantically alternating between tricks in a futile effort to baby my combo timer. Once I understood I was free to skate more calmly, I stopped constantly shattering my skater's body and my lines became a lot cleaner—and more satisfying.

Those boss sequences wouldn't hit nearly as hard without Skate Story's soundtrack. Blood Cultures, the experimental band that contributed most of the game's music, is a perfect pairing for Sam Eng's vision of Hell, alternating between pounding, synthetic menace, hushed, aching melodies, and—when The Skater's allowed to go off—manic, liberatory crescendos. During intense moments Skate Story's environmental lighting and post-processing synchronize with the thundering instrumentals of the soundtrack like Blood Cultures was possessing the game itself.

The Devil's Geometry

As you might guess from all the glass demonry and moon eating, Skate Story has a unique vibe. It casually coasts between oppressively infernal imagery, cosmic portent, and surreal irony. There are obsidian slabs carved with instructions for performing ollies. At one point, I entered a sentient trash bag to discover a maze of skatable tunnels, because physical space in the underworld obeys "the Devil's Geometry." Souls are money and I can earn more by disspelling pools of the moon's accursed light with a few flip tricks.

It's not always coherent. Playing Skate Story is a bit like absorbing the demonic imagery of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, where the effect of seeing a tormented soul playing a flute with his butt is more important than understanding why it's happening.

That said, Sam Eng's idea of Hell is a very different image than the one conjured by the Italian writers and Dutch painters of the Renaissance. Rather than a fiery pit, Skate Story's underworld is a warped, chimeric New York. It's a metropolis of dripping concrete and sleep paralysis architecture, where structures are textured with melting oilslick jpegs of what might've once been more pleasant buildings.

Existential malice and bureaucratic absurdity share a block with the thoroughly mundane. Hell has bodegas and 24-hour laundromats. The Department of Death is 40 seconds of skating away from a local cafe. A gift shop where I can buy skate decks and stickers—my personal favorite is a wok-wielding shrimp with the text "GET BUSY FRYING OR GET BUSY DYING"—is on the same street as "The Meanings Factory," which is "powered by state of the art ennui technology."

Rhythm and pulse

The underworld's torments are familiar, too, if a bit more permanent. Eternal damnation in Skate Story doesn't involve much pitchfork prodding or being flayed alive forever. Instead, Hell is going hungry. Hell is exhaustion. Hell is not having a place to sleep. It's being unable to stop inventorying your regrets and tallying your wasted time, and hoping you'll get fired so you can at least stop working your terrible job.

It didn't feel accidental that Hell's miseries echo many of those being endured around us. And yet, living in Hell can be surprisingly chill. Despite the crimson ribs sprouting from the pavement and the occasional metal beam enclosure labeled "CAGE OF SORROW" in perfunctory sans serif font, Skate Story's dreamscapes—while small—are meditative backdrops that I loved combing for potential lines to skate. It's the same paradox in the underworld as it is above: Woe and contentment can share a close proximity. Skate Story's gravest sin is that there's no way to revisit earlier skate spots without starting a new game—something I hope gets addressed in post-launch updates.

What I wished I could appreciate more is how deeply Skate Story feels like a game about New York. I'm a native of New York the state but not New York the city; Skate Story is speaking a familiar language with familiar sounds, but in a dialect I don't fully understand. From Languishin Square to Hellsea to Godhook, I could sense how it's saturated with a particular kind of minor key nostalgia accessible to anyone who's felt the pleasant melancholy of walking home from work in a nighttime rain.

But it's colored with such a local specificity that I couldn't help but envy those who better know the source. I've got plenty of experience being depressed elsewhere, but I haven't been depressed in New York.

Skate Story's writing, meanwhile, has a character all its own. Its narration is a longform poem recounting The Skater's quest with an indulgence that occasionally veers into grammar agnosticism. Words bleed back and forth across the boundaries between noun, verb, and adjective as if they're following the same Devil's Geometry as the underworld's uncanny skateways. Moonlight growls the ground. Skull demons insist they'll catch vibes in half with a pair of shears.

It's half-nonsense that in other contexts I'd think was in need of an editor. But against the backdrop of the absurdity, irony, and general unfathomability of Hell, it tends to work. And when it doesn't land, it's not long before a line like "The skateboard vibrated with a divine frequency" appears on screen to unfurrow my brow.

Set it on fire

Throughout the whole game, the skating really only stumbled when the linear sections leading into setpieces were too optimistic about my ability to perform sharp turns or dodge unexpected obstacles at over 30 mph. Wiping out just as things accelerated into full spectacle had a way of slamming the brakes at the worst possible moment. But those were ultimately brief hiccups.

Skate Story had already won me over in its opening chapters, but it culminates in a stunning closing sequence that's on an altogether different tier of audiovisual and presentational ambition. In my last hour skateboarding became a cosmic force with such biblical-scale intensity that the game as I knew it up until that point started to buckle around it.

It's experimental. It's funny. There's a frog. I'd be doing a disservice by describing it with anything but the most general terms, but I'll be replaying the ending of Skate Story in my head for months, even if the impact was slightly dulled by my inability to avoid shattering myself at high speeds.

At the end, Skate Story's message—that we should believe something better is possible, even if it threatens to break us—isn't new. But in a world that detests you for being in it, what else is there to do but reject it? We all skate down here.