Skin Deep

Skin Deep is a short and mostly sweet immersive sim set on a succession of small self-contained spaceship levels. It has a fun sense of humor infusing both narrative and mechanics. If you like immsims like Deus Ex and Prey and Dishonored, you will almost certainly find Skin Deep to be worthwhile. That said... If you haven't played those, I don't think this is an ideal introduction to the genre. And if you didn't love them, I doubt Skin Deep will redeem your opinion. I personally enjoyed the game a *lot*...up until the last handful of levels which, in the pursuit of increased difficulty, ended up narrowing player options and increasing tedious waiting for an opportunity in overlapping enemy patrols in a way that I felt made the levels less enjoyable. For example: I got a huge amount of visceral satisfaction in the earlier levels from antagonizing and leading a bunch of enemies into a room with a window, then breaking the window to space them. That felt like a very fun reward for creative management of the enemies and environment! But then in the latter levels, enough of the enemies are of a tougher variant immune to the perils of space that whenever I still got to space some folks, it was against small groups of one or two, and there was often still a terribly well-armed super pirate still left over to sound the alarm and give me a hard time. Changing the game is good, but closing the door without also opening any new windows felt really rough. This sort of narrowing of options and cutting off the things that felt the most fun and rewarding was a recurring pattern as Skin Deep flipped from its early game pattern of regularly introducing new mechanics and broadening the gameplay, to narrowing them for the sake of making the latter levels more challenging. I understand the logic and why it would be done this way, but it hurt my personal enjoyment of the game and left me with a pretty sour taste at the end. The final level should have been an amazing experience, the biggest yet and introducing a new form of challenge I was happy to get behind (navigation!) since it meant there was *more* stuff instead of less. (Really wish I could have used my note-reading time-pausing vision to read the map in peace, but I digress.) But the difficulty level was cranked up so high with the number of enemies, with relatively limited options for dealing with them, and certainly not the most fun ones, that my predominant experience of that last level was frustration. (It got better once I got into the vents and could actually get around the level without being constantly shot at, upgrading from quite frustrating to merely not very fun. But up to that point, scouring the entire level for the dang access code whilst a score of enemies took shots at me and I was equipped with scarcely better than two pepper boxes and one bar of soap to fight back with, I was not a happy camper.) My own opinion would have been substantially improved if at least after these frustrating later levels that cramped my style by limiting my options, maybe there could have been an epilogue of bonus levels that went all-in on freedom and fun. Because to me the biggest problem with Skin Deep is not that it experimented a bit with narrowing options and harder levels - like, at least it can be part of the range of experiences the game can offer - but rather that it ended on what for me was its absolute nadir. Maybe there's still a chance of such an update..? There's a whole workshop and setup to allow players to make their own levels which has gone mostly unused, which is a shame. Maybe a few more especially zany levels by the devs could be the defib the game needs to get its own community rolling? C'mon devs, I'd happily shell out a few more dollars for an expansion to wash out the taste of that last level.

Like this a lot! Short imsim with some fun levels and goofy stuff going on. However, it does have some performance issues. The game doesn't have graphics settings as far as I can tell so you can't change anything, this allegedly plays fine on Steam Deck which seems far fetched considering it didn't run very well on my PC which, I mean I'll attach the specs. I do still think it's worth playing regardless of the performance, just keep it in mind before purchase if something like that will bother you too much to enjoy it.