Can’t sleep? Moon too bright? Want to eat it? It’s a simple goal for a demon in the underworld, as you’ll find in this gorgeous, extraordinary narrative adventure that just so happens to require skateboarding.
It’s been almost twenty years since I lived in New York City, but there’s something sorcerous about meeting art that can so fiercely resurrect such a deeply personal time and place for an audience of one. Skate Story is one of these experiences; and for even more reasons, it’s easily an all-timer of a game. Sure, my hands are two rigid claws, my pre-arthritic joints are flaring up like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. My janky left shoulder is twinging, as it does when I get caught up doing computery things, and my heart is beating in the heels of my palms from deathgripping my controller. Frankly, this is just how movement-intense, combo-centric gaming feels when you’re not a svelte, well-oiled machine anymore. I’m a desk jockey made of SSRIs and pain, and I must skate.
The six-year road to Skate Story was defined by its gorgeous trailers, but Sam Eng truly played his cards close to the chest with just how much lyrical beauty and exquisite weirdness vibrates throughout the game; this in itself is very much a product, which Eng has mentioned in interviews, of New York City as a muse. It’s a dynamic love letter to psychogeography, starting with ghostly little hints of the city like vapor on a window before growing into a full-fledged ode to familiar places and entities and mainstays that dot the city. But in the beginning, there is nothing – only a vast expanse flooded in moonlight.
The protagonist is a demon of simple tastes – because the Moon is so obnoxiously bright in the underworld, no one can sleep. When the demon decides they’re going to eat it, the Devil offers a little help (the skateboard) for a price (their soul). And so, the Glass Skater is born, though of course there is never just one Moon, and no soul across space and time should ever trust the Devil. As a former insomniac who was prescribed clownish amounts of sedatives, the quest to sleep speaks to me more than you can imagine. I also have nothing but deep respect for this flavor of disproportionately aggressive pettiness, because you know what? We’re going to eat the hell out of the Moon.
I am not a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater acolyte, though I was a decent snowboarder when I was younger and rabidly collected Mack Dawg VHS tapes and TransWorld magazines to carry me through the off-season. My introduction to skateboarding didn’t come until my first staff job at a magazine. We needed a hands-on sports story for a particular issue, and when an opportunity arose to learn to skateboard, I was ordered, as the youngest and most able-bodied person on staff, to get firmly but gently pushed into a quarterpipe by a Canadian model named Mikey wearing Vans slip-ons with feet painted on them.
Skate Story is blessedly less of a Pro Skater game and far more of a narrative adventure rollercoaster that requires skateboarding; I’m not really sure what I expected going into it, despite gushing over the trailers like so many others, but I didn’t expect to tune into it on its same divine frequency so effortlessly. Eng eases us into the basics of street skateboarding with a gentle hand – we start with basic things like learning how to ollie and powerslide, before progressing to intermediate and more advanced tricks that score more points. The points here are called Souls, the game’s currency, which the Skater can use to buy new skateboard components and stickers at the gift shop.
Street skateboarding is the people’s weapon, and the Skater wields the skateboard like an extension of their own body. There are gauntlets and portals and timed doomsday events, which sound a bit stressful for a skating-but-not-all-skating game, but in the most freestyle and rewarding way (you can’t die, but can get back up on the board and do it again, with the thrill and fear of knowing every attempt will be different). Eating the Moon isn’t easy, so the Skater has to string tricks together as fluidly as possible to form combos, and end them with a well-timed stomp to damage the Moon. Eng has fun here playing with targeted stomp areas around boss arenas, sort of like roving weak points on a colossus; there are also “Moonlit Spots” scattered around the world that can be triggered to reap a fat cache of Souls. Many of the later boss fights are laser-precise ballets (some more so than others) that melted my brain into an ecstatically unhinged flow state; none of this would be possible without the absolutely sublime music by Blood Cultures and John Fio (also special shoutout to Rabbie the rabbit’s voice effects – it really became a sort of ASMR for me).
The real meat of Skate Story, to me, is unpacking the game as emotion-driven narrative through psychogeography; as a huge fan of Cosmo D games, traversing a cityscape (or really any peopled terrain with a story to tell) with one foot planted in imaginary ether and one foot on the ground is my favorite way to travel. The game has a truly precious cast of NPCs that have found permanent homes in my heart. Packed with dry humor, Skate Story also touches on the vilification of skateboarding as an antisocial punk menace, which historically holds righteous meaning for minorities and persecuted groups in so many communities. Street skating has always been, and always will be a portal to joy and identity in built, contrived environments, which ends up reflecting unique facets of specific places and cultures – it’s so much about adaptation and resilience and means a thousand different things to different people because skateboarding is, at its core, parsing space through an intensely personal physical experience, warts and all.
For Sam Eng and Skate Story, this space is New York City. On my most indulgent idiot-writer tangent, my brain started spooling off threads about Eng’s fellow New Yorker and writer Samuel R. Delany – mostly his novel Dhalgren which drove me to salt and ruin, along with some short stories – who had such a chaotic and inscrutable way of exploring place, identity, metaphor, and “mythological resonance” in the latter (as well as literally New York in many of his other works; Dhalgren is set in a midwestern US city, but with such New York sensibilities). Skate Story visually touches on a lot of the same themes – circular texts, looping, prismatic reflection and repetition, and the malleability of perception – while kickflipping past a saturated chemtrail of Moons. And while Dhalgren has been interpreted as a cyclical exploration of capitalist power, here, Eng gives us the cyclical nature of the Devil’s geometry, which dictates the laws of the underworld and the Skater’s trajectory.
There are more obvious intertextual references, of course – spot-on Evangelion (reader, I laughed, it’s so perfect), place-centric postmodern narrative games like Kentucky Road Zero and Norco, classical philosophy, a pinch of Derrida, poetic verse, a touch of Dante, and hints of literary film. It’s a postmodern fable for outcasts and misfits made with exquisite care. In Guy Debord’s own words, “the groping search for a new way of life is the only thing that remains really exciting.” If aimless walking (“drifting,” to be precise, but Frenchly) was considered an act of rebellion when psychogeography was first born, skating to eat the Moon amplifies that insurgency tenfold. Throughout it all, there is pain – a lot of pain, since the Skater is glass and the game never lets you forget that it hurts – and a fierce sense of regenerative violence whenever the Skater reconstitutes and tries again. And above it all, Sam Eng is funny. This guy knows the power of levity in the face of meaninglessness, and it means everything in a game that runs on loops.
My few gripes are very small and personal. My learning curve, overall, was slower and steeper than most because I have a plethora of orthopedic problems; I was aware of this before playing, and took breaks and wore all my preventative ergonomic gear, but couldn’t help myself from spamming the trickier boss battles at the expense of my flesh-and-bone body. As mentioned before, I have zero experience with other skateboarding games, and decent real-life experience with one board-based sport. My default comfort zone stance is natural (left foot forward), and after officially learning how to switch stances in the game, my Skater appeared to be goofy (right foot forward). This created a lot of cognitive dipshittery, especially when I was speeding along au naturale with the small “SWITCH STANCE” text floating in the corner of my screen (Was this a directive? Was this simply a status indicator? It perplexed me). There were times I kept accidentally dismounting the board in the middle of a sick combo because of no-brain clipping the wrong button, and I would hiss through my teeth and slink off to the Skater’s Dream (a neutral base area) to lick my wounds.
Skate Story is, hands down, my game of the year, and perhaps one of my favorite narrative games of all time. It is beautiful and funny and poignant and challenging – all of the things one wants out of a well-told tale – and above all, at least to me, a devastatingly rich text that I feel borderline gleeful about unpacking, slowly, at my own pace, over time. It’s an adventure that runs wild on adrenaline and wide-eyed wonder; there are fourth-wall breaks, quiet interludes, adorable little guys, and across the board, absolutely glorious visuals (the menu design! It’s an S-tier game menu!). If the Skater is a pilgrim, if Rabbie the rabbit is his Virgil, then roast me like a marshmallow in the fires of hell, because I want to do it all over again. Sam Eng has emphasised that this is a deeply personal game for him, but in this intimacy hides shared experiences and universality: we may all run on the Devil’s geometry, but with a little luck and perseverance, maybe we can make it out together.
A copy of Skate Story was provided for this review by Devolver Digital.
