{"id":18143,"date":"2025-12-09T17:10:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T09:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=18143"},"modified":"2025-12-09T17:10:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T09:10:34","slug":"skate-story-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=18143","title":{"rendered":"Skate Story Review"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There are a lot of skateboarding games, and I feel like I\u2019ve played most of them. Some of them are majestic. Some are not. The Simpsons Skateboarding was the absolute pits. Tony Hawk: Ride was tortuous pain. This year\u2019s Skate is a microtransaction hellscape.<\/p>\n

Enter Skate Story. Like those latter examples, it too is a trip to skateboarding hell and a study in pain. In this case, however, that\u2019s actually the whole point of this extremely peculiar journey through perdition on a piece of 7-ply. I wasn\u2019t always <\/em>aboard for the sheer and utter weirdness of Skate Story\u2019s broader adventure, but there\u2019s no doubt developer Sam Eng has successfully married it to a robust and approachable set of skate mechanics \u2013 and it certainly makes for a memorable skateboarding game like no other I\u2019ve ever played.<\/p>\n

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Skate Story is a slightly tricky game to describe, if only because attempting to even discuss the plot sounds a little like you\u2019re making it up on the spot. The deal is you\u2019re a demon made out of glass and pain, marooned in Hell. It\u2019s referred to as The Underworld, more specifically \u2013 but the Devil is here, either way. I know this because I have his pants.<\/p>\n

From the Devil comes a deal. That is, you can be free on one condition: you find a way to flip, grind, and manual your way to the moon \u2013 and eat it<\/em>. For some reason.<\/p>\n

Are you still following? Because I haven\u2019t even got to the frog barista yet. Or the subway train with legs.<\/p>\n

Are you still following? Because I haven\u2019t even got to the frog barista yet. <\/div>\n

I\u2019m hesitant to say much else lest I spoil any of the particularly quirky developments along the way, so just be aware Skate Story is an incredibly weird trip through a bizarre underworld. To be candid, this isn\u2019t really <\/em>the kind of thing I\u2019d typically seek out. That is, the stories I like normally feature big guys causing problems in small towns, assassins with grudges, or pictures of fighter planes on the cover. That is, I\u2019m more David Leitch than David Lynch, if that makes sense. Skate Story did largely win me over, though. There were definitely moments I found myself getting a little numb to the weirdness, on account of just how offbeat it sometimes gets, but overall I admire the commitment to its surrealistic vision.<\/p>\n

Its story is told via text that you can read through at your own pace. There\u2019s no voice acting or voiceover \u2013 and there\u2019s an argument to be mounted that it might\u2019ve gained a bit of gravity from some kind of baritone narration \u00e0 la The Stanley Parable or Bastion \u2013 but Skate Story\u2019s finely honed soundtrack means there\u2019s still plenty to listen to. Assembled by New Jersey band Blood Cultures, the music is a generous mix of the group\u2019s experimental, electro-pop sound, and it ranges in tempo and intensity as the locations and pace of the levels vary. This sort of music is also comfortably out of my usual wheelhouse, but nonetheless I found it extremely evocative and catchy, and it suits Skate Story to a T. It fabulously complements The Underworld\u2019s abstract environments, and the atmosphere of its eternal night backdrop.<\/p>\n

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Don\u2019t be fooled by Skate Story’s grainy, low-fi look, either; this is one of the most eye-catching and imaginative-looking games I\u2019ve played in recent memory. Its psychedelic vision for a neon underworld blends jagged forests of spikes with broken slabs of ancient architecture, and twisted blocks of New York City with carpets of stars. Watching this wild world refract through a sneaker-clad demon made entirely of glass is certainly something.<\/p>\n

Pain in the Glass<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The controls are not immediately intuitive, because they\u2019re noticeably different from the approach taken by the sorts of dedicated sports-oriented skating games a lot of us are familiar with. That is, Skate Story doesn\u2019t have tricks mapped to flicking an analogue stick around like the Skate series (or both <\/em>analogue sticks, as in the case of something like Session). It\u2019s more in line with playing something like Tony Hawk, only imagine someone remapped all the buttons.<\/p>\n

Basic tricks are activated by a combination of either a shoulder button or trigger plus a face button, and grinds occur when you pop and land suitably on a rail or ledge. A variety of other, progressively more complex tricks are rationed out and taught to us as the story unfolds over its roughly six-hour duration. It\u2019s not a revolutionary approach, sure, but it\u2019s a smart one since having us always picking up new tricks keeps things fresh throughout. There was a moderate learning curve as I sought to archive decades of THPS muscle memory in order to learn Skate Story\u2019s own specific trick system \u2013 but it didn\u2019t take too long to come to grips with. <\/p>\n

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\"Tier<\/p>\n

Rank these skateboarding video games<\/h3>\n

Rank these skateboarding video games<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

It\u2019s all very grounded and weighty, which I like, and the tricks look great in motion with the low slung camera that tumbles to the ground like a physical object each time you bail and shatter to bits. I love how the powerslides feel, and I love the slow motion enders we\u2019re rewarded with for our successes. When it comes to vibes, Skate Story nails the landing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all very grounded and weighty… and the tricks look great in motion with the low slung camera.<\/div>\n

There\u2019s a timing mechanism for executing tricks that results in different pop heights, which is illustrated by an on-screen doodle (a different shape for each trick). Depending on the speed of your skater, a marker will trace the doodle slowly or quickly \u2013 and there\u2019s a sweet spot for getting max altitude \u2013 but I have to admit I generally paid little attention to it. On default settings, Skate Story never demanded a fastidious level of timing finesse to get through its levels and defeat bosses. This suits me just fine, but the fact that you can <\/em>just essentially spam your way through a lot of the most frantic-looking segments may come across as a little trivial to anyone looking for a stiffer challenge.<\/p>\n

Tony Hawk\u2019s Underworld<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Boss battles are handled in an interesting way, and to win these encounters you need to build up combos and \u201cstomp\u201d them down inside a marked zone. They can be cleared with a bit of mild button-mashing, but there\u2019s certainly room to be much more deliberate about your trick selection and timing if you choose to (and you will, admittedly, accumulate better combos and deal more damage \u2013 and faster \u2013 if you do). There are also a number of small and trippy sandbox-style levels to cruise around with various objectives to complete, but some of these tasks do <\/em>get disappointingly trivial. For instance, one mission that called on me to gather up a selection of floating letters sounded like a cute nod to Skate Story\u2019s ancestors \u2013 but most of them were just hovering at ground level, turning what could\u2019ve been a brief but fun challenge into a basic fetch quest across the map and back.<\/p>\n

My favourite parts of Skate Story, however, were the speed segments, where you must hustle from your spawn point to an ethereal exit door \u2013 like some kind of haunted hill bomb. The music ramps up for these high-speed bursts, and I like the fast-paced trial-and-error nature of them as your fragile demon smashes to shards and you instantly get another crack. I always felt a little pang of regret when I reached the end of these runs, and I wish there were a few more of them.<\/p>\n

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