Skin Deep

This game is so damn REFRESHING, like holy heck, its so original it completely broke me. Every little part of the game is hyper unique in its own way. There is some roughness and repetiveness that drags it down SLIGHTLY, but it really is just absolutely OOZING with charm. Very well done, very fun. You play as the insurance commando on a number of unique ships. Pirates come in, you come out to play. I could ooze about the world or the aesthetic but I think giving a list of the crazy weird design choices would be better This game has: -Sneezing -Prone-movement blocking if you are in a tight space and couldn't turn around. -Enemies do not die, their heads pop off and float to regeneration devices, so you have to get creative and find ways to get rid of the heads. At one point I succumbed to my own success, killed 6 enemies, and had to juggle the heads because you only get 5 inventory spots and I had no way to dispose of them -You can exit the ship and choose your vector of entry. You can exit and enter through garbage chutes, windows, and airlocks. -If you enter or exit via garbage, you will stink and have to use deodorant or a shower to fix it. -Game comes with a unique scanner system that lets you analyze rooms and items from a safe distance to look for opportunities -Guns are truly uniquely implemented, different buttons to reload and rack shells so you have to actively rack the shotgun or chamber the rifle/pistol. Odd but delightful bit of realistic firearms management. The guns are also some of the more unique designs I have seen in a game, the damn shotgun is bandolier-belt-fed. -Novel health system with statuses. If you have a shard of glass in your foot, its going to hurt when you walk until you remove it. I really am having a blast with this game and highly recommend it. Its so damn unique! Edit: Ok! I have beaten the game now. Took me about ~10 hours, not bad at all content wise. I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay and the worldbuilding. I do want to talk a bit on the game's weakest points. Please be aware I still LOVED it and would easily recommend it. The story, and the theming, are so very, very off. 1. The Theming This game has a James Bond-style movie intro and a ton of spy music and themes, but almost literally no other vibes that lean into it. You are an insurance commando, not a spy. The pistol you see on the cover is extremely rare and usually only chambered with one bullet because it's so powerful, so casting it as part of Nina's standard character equipment is very strange. The whole spy angle in general is just plain odd. Your character is a former criminal turned insurance commando—which is sort of KINDA a spy loop (I mean, Kate Archer was a cat burglar turned UNITY agent, props if you know that reference)—but still, the entire framing for this game is very distant from the actual experience presented. The game is a MacGyver simulator, and it feels like it's confused about its inspirations. The era of "secret agent" media sort of splits into James Bond superspy fantasies and blue-collar, action-adventure gritty underdog shows like MacGyver. All of the game's theming leans toward the former, but all of the gameplay and design lean toward the latter. It might be an intentional choice, but either way, it's jarring and discordant. 2. The Story They shoulda just left it out. It had the bones of something really cool, but you can see that problems arose during the fleshing out. Anywhere the story can be expressed through notes, emails, or other environmental details, it is gloriously well-written and tells you a lot about the characters. However, at every point they try to tell it through missions or cutscenes, it is just plain awful to endure. I think that's because their gameplay loop wasn't able to be translated into the settings they wanted to use for their narrative. The game is a living parody of a number of tropes from the previously mentioned media, and the issue is that a good parody should also be a good example of the material it's parodying. Skin Deep tries too hard to parody and not hard enough to be its own unique story. The story missions all basically involve next-to-no interactions from you—no sneaking, no combat—you are just walking through a sequence of static scenes. These scenes jarringly cut from one to the next as you move. Approaching a door? ZAP! Now you are halfway down a hallway. Walk two feet? ZAP, you're in the office you were heading to. It's nauseating, it's weird, and it contributes so little that just having the game be a set of contracts without an overarching plot would probably have been better. The story is constantly suffocated by how much it wants to do, jumping between Clint Eastwood cop tropes, "former criminal on one last job" tropes, and just about everywhere else. It's choked by how much they wanted to pack in and how little of it is actually fun to interact with. If they could redo it, they'd need to make the "story missions" actual unique gameplay scenarios, or just ditch them in favor of something like comic book-style panels. Actual gameplay missions could easily have taken place at all the story junctures, so it's very strange to me that they avoided doing that. The story interludes feel so terribly underbaked when the rest of the game has an enormous amount of love and effort put into it. It's truly jarring—like a AAA game in its gameplay with a low-effort mod as the cutscenes. For a game that was so unbelievably unique in how it plays, how the world is built, seeing the story chained down like this without any of the wild and novel universe flavor is a big loss. Still an absolutely great game in spite of all that, please do play it!

Very fun to play, to learn the mechanics of the game and then abuse them. Fun story too

The worst part is when the game ends. This absolute masterpiece is worth more than they ask for. You get cats, funny references, friendship, loads of notes and sound cues, cool secrets and overall fantastic game design. You also get Nina Pasadena, who is the best insurance commando. Devs pls let me pay you for more maps and freelancing DLC.