Return to Nuevos Aires : Skin Deep

This blog post contains spoiler images for Skin Deep. The reader is encouraged to buy and play Skin Deep. 

It's 2008. I am out of my first College and into my Second College when I hear about this game called Gravity Bone. It's an indie game and all the blogs I read are talking about it. I download the game, the first level I am supposed to plant a literal bug in someone's drink. After I do and the level ends the game explains what the "Manitoba Beast Bug" is and gives a rudimentary diagram, a distorted voice tells me it can be used to track targets throughout "the universe" and this implies a greater world beyond this cocktail party.

It's 2025 and a lifetime later, a talking cat explains that I can track my target, who is trying to kill me, via a tracking device known as the Manitoba Beast Bug. And I flip out. I am hours deep into Skin Deep. This is a throwaway gag in a fictional universe held together with throwaway lines. But it's the same diagram. It feels like a promise has been fulfilled that I didn't know was a promise at the time. Finally, the Manitoba Bug Beast makes sense, and is crucial to this game's ending.

Blendo Game's work exists in this "Brazil" like setting where there's space travel but also lounge music, there's talking cats but also bugs that can be tracked across the universe. When someone says a camera can photograph a flea across the galaxy - they mean so in a very literal sense, and you're about to find out it isn't a joke. Irony can't surive here, everyone is forced to be sincere, and it works. 

First there was Gravity Bone. Then There was Thirty Flights of Loving. And then there was Quadrilateral Cowboy. All of these games connected to the fictional city of Nuevos Aires, a place that feels more real than Batman's Gotham. In Gravity Bone you're a spy that ends up on top of a table with everyone staring at you. In Thirty Flights you're piecing together a job gone wrong. In Quadrilateral Cowboy you're living on the fringes doing work for theives. Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights both took the "Walking Simulator" genre and turned it on it's head, using the art of the smash cut and level design to tell stories and scenes that AAA games couldn't touch. Blendo Games likes to use the one shot level to set a specific scene and a specific tone, and continued this with Quadrilateral Cowboy, while also adding an incredible system driven stealth game. 

Quadrilateral Cowboy, while in the same universe, tells the story of a hacker's life from early days to late days. It's a lot more dour. There's a scene in the game where the protagonist augments their limbs via a series of vending machines, and I have always interpreted this as a riff of the Stroggification scene from Quake 4 - where the protagonist's body is modified in first person inside a nightmare alien factory. i also think this because both games are made with the Quake engine, Idtech 3 and 4. 

Idtech is a weird fucking engine, I have used it to help make Call Of Duty Vanguard, it's "interpretation" of C and BSP based level editing can be very limiting. If you have enough money you can make anything with it, if you're Blendo Games you can make art with it.

So with a mastery of Idtech, a system design expertise, a visual storytelling mastery, it is time for Blendo to fire on all cylinders and do what every game designer wants to do : make an immersive sim.

Blendo has made The Velvet Underground of Immersive Sims. 

Too many games bring the production to a screeching halt to TELL YOU how to play the game. Press X to Pay Respects. That Sort of thing. As a professional game designer I can say that: gamers DO NOT READ. If you place text in front of them they will not read it. But in Skin Deep: writing is everywhere. You can inspect any item, and the warning label on it tells you what will happen. Deoderant is flammable. Bolts all have spark warnings. Put two and two together, and you have a fireball. But it isn't just Deoderant that can ignite - but sanitizer too. And you can light sparks with bullets you pull out of your own body. This is how the game teaches a player to read. 

Skin Deep is a language of slapstick violence that you use to write your own elaborate jokes. There is a boarding party, they are all bunched together, but I have discovered TNT. I set the trap and it explodes, their heads all floating around like so many balloons. If they reach a respawn point they will regenerate, but if I find the key to their boarding ship i can end the level, so I frantically float through the cloud of heads looking for the key. 

The worst games of this generation try very badly to be movies and fail at being a game and a movie. The best games realize they're games and succeed on those terms: thus the narrative conceit in Skin Deep that nobody actually dies, their heads pop off and eventally someone will find them again. This means the carefully crafted combat systems aren't ignored in favor of non leathal options because the player has the curse of NPC empathy. Sometimes you don't have enough to kill the enemy and are left with the options of deception and misdirection - you throw a cat toy and pick their pockets. The space pirates are just dumb enough to fall for most things, but not everything.

The game has guns, sure, but you have to chamber a round, you have to cock the shotgun each time you make a shot. You have to check tht there's a round first before you fire, because ammo is so precious. There is never enough ammo to swap a mag out, you are always counting your shots. The auto pistol always hits everytime, but I didn't realize this until later in the game, instead I thought i had just gotten really fucking lucky with my last bullet. 

For the final part of the final mission I re-entered the ship via a trash chute, which gives you a “smelly” status effect that I was never able to clear, I just kept running around the vents getting all of the space pirates' attention with the smell, who kept trying to flush the vent system. I ended up shooting the one guy with the boarding ship key with an auto pistol, then ran in and grabbed it, before bolting it to the exit.

Sometimes the game engine is brough to it's knees by the amount of explosions and actions happening and honestly this feels good, it should feel like the world is coming apart when there's 30 explosions at once.

Every Blendo game up until this point (that I have played) has ended too soon. Gravity Bone hinted at a much larger world that we got to see in the subsequent games. Thirty Flights left more hints. Quadrilateral Cowboy gives you the entire toolbox but only one level to really use them in. Skin Deep, however, finally nails the pacing of the introduction of systems, and in the final level starts to even take a few of them away.

I will be replaying these missions many times over. Finding the secrets and doing the side objectives, while also performing weirder and weirder stunts on the space pirates. 

I should add: while I think about it - that the game's first person movement is incredibly smooth. I have never played a game where I could see where I wanted to go and then go there with little to no friction. After several hours in the game, movement feels effortless, you can duck and weve around the ships with ease, crawling around vents and under desks rapidly. I have played many FPS games and several stealth games, and they almost always have a degree of clumsiness to them especially if it's in first person. Skin Deep has none of these flaws, and a keen game designer should study this game if they wanted to really do first person stealth. 

I am not sure what else there is to say about Skin Deep. People are speculating about the future of Grand Theft Auto but I'm thinking about where Blendo goes from here, in a perfect world Annapurna gives them a ton of money to make more levels and a few more systems for a DLC pack and a console release. I am also wondering if I will see Nuevos Aires again.

Really I am just thankful to see a game outfit have a vision, and iterate on that vision over decades. Not everyone played Gravity Bone, but everyone who did ended up making a videogame.