Hitting a varial heelflip at 25 mph in a lo-fi dreamscape while listening to electric psych-pop is an experience unlike any other – and it’s freaking awesome.
“Skate Story” by Sam Eng, an indie game developer from New York, combines the immense pain of skating with the atmosphere of a psychedelic wonderland. Players skate, ollie and kickflip in the Underworld beneath New York City, trying to fulfill an impossible contract with the devil to eat the moon.
To uplift the insane plot into the cosmos, Eng collaborated with secretive music group Blood Cultures and indie artist John Fio to create a soundtrack for otherworldly skating. Serene synthesizers, lo-fi electric guitar tracks and brutally heavy electronic dance hits allow your tricks to feel both fragile and legendary.
For $20 and a four hour runtime, the game packs in nine distinct chapters with little to no downtime. It melds skateboarding with a story about determination, poetry and darkness. Your journey to eat the moon takes you to various corners of the underworld, both comically realistic in its context and otherworldly in its nature. One minute, you’ll be skating through demon eyes trying to stop you from awakening some “eternal centipede,” and the next, you’ll be washing the devil’s pants in a laundromat.
There are legendary characters such as a manuscript-writing pigeon who needs you to find scattered letters across the Underworld to help him write his magnum opus. Despite the craziness, it’s these little comical absurdities that allow you to connect with the game and invest in your character, the mute demon skater.
Most of the game’s runtime is spent learning new skate tricks and using them to blast bosses or other demons into the stratosphere. To attack and survive in the Underworld, you have to land as many tricks as possible, as fast and possible and make sure they’re stylish, too. Landing three different variations of a kickflip while rotating 180 degrees to stomp a demon out of this existence is incredibly satisfying.
For anybody that’s played “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” the “Skate” series or owns a skateboard at all, this experience will heighten your interest in the hobby. Skateboarding is about feeling as light as air on a tiny piece of wood, all with the possibility of getting flung off at any minute and eating pavement. Shattering into glass pieces when you fail to land an ollie against a mythical demon trying to throw you off matches the feeling of falling on your butt quite impressively.
What drew me to this game, and what should interest you, is that it truly recreates what skating feels like both mentally and physically. In real life, seeing other skaters perform tricks and trying to do the same, only to fall over and crash repeatedly, is mentally taxing, but brutally rewarding when you finally master a trick. When you crash into a wall in “Skate Story,” and your glass body depletes into a million shards, you’re disappointed, but you get back up again, then ollie, kickflip and treflip until that wall crashes through you.
After mastering every trick I possibly could and watching the credits roll, the celestial feeling I developed when skating failed to leave my mind. I found myself listening to the psychedelic soundtrack in the car, doing homework or whenever I wanted to relive the brutal rush of bombing a hill in that digital landscape.
If you want something new, creative and incredibly insane, try out “Skate Story.”
