You are a demon of glass and pain. Literally. Wanting to escape Hell, you sign a contract with the Devil to devour the moons that illuminate the many layers of the realm. Your steed is the skateboard, a forbidden item that you’ll utilize to kick and push your way through the Underworld, acting as the Silver Surfer to your own Galactus. Skate Story’s strange premise and surreal art direction are equal parts compelling and head-scratching. While the gameplay is mixed, I enjoyed this fascinating mix of extreme sports and biblical poetry.
Skateboarding enthusiasts shouldn’t expect to catch spectacular halfpipe jumps or memorize a long list of tricks. It is a story-driven experience, drawing narrative inspiration from the stories of Dante Alighieri Hell. The skater’s descent into a humorously bureaucratic hell is full of strange, tormented souls that I enjoyed interacting with. The story itself is a mesmerizing and poetic onslaught of strange moments and dreamy places that each player will interpret differently, but I liked how it effectively conveyed hope and perseverance. Best of all, there are plenty of infirmed stunts you can perform along the way.
Skating is fun and basic to learn with basic and tight arcade-style controls. The moves are introduced at a good pace, allowing me to master relatively basic tricks like ollies, varials, grinds, and kickflips without overwhelming me. The compact, skate park-like centers that make up each layer of Hell are decent playgrounds where you can freely practice linking moves to create combos. Minor environmental interactions, such as performing varials to mow the grass or ollieing special hatches, reward currency for purchasing fresh skateboard cosmetics such as decks and wheels. I appreciate how this structure encourages and rewards doing tricks without interruption, but the hubs never offer more than a few basic ramps and rails, so they don’t stay invigorating for long. By the second half, I had lost the desire to hang around in these spaces and headed straight for the more enjoyable main goal of filling my crystal belly with moons.
Conquering the moon requires basic tasks from strange and tortured inhabitants. Finding cubes of wisdom for a sentient marble bust or helping a pigeon finish a manuscript by collecting scattered letters (a cheeky nod to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater) aren’t the most profound pursuits, but the sheer strangeness of the situations make them more compelling than they otherwise would be. Skate Story thrives on a surreal atmosphere and, above all, a captivating art direction that offers one of the most whimsical and imaginative interpretations of hell I’ve ever seen. It trades the grim fire and brimstone for a kaleidoscopic, cosmic film grain aesthetic that’s probably worth the price of admission to admire.
Gameplay begins in linear sequences of swift skating, where you navigate challenging tracks and avoid obstacles through multiple checkpoints, often with a time limit. These segments are a hit with their excellent sense of speed and a psychedelic soundtrack that swells as the skating gets faster and more hazardous; I definitely recommend wearing headphones. I would easily trade exploring the relatively flat center for a larger playlist of these white-knuckled sprints.
Quick restarts ease the pain of erasing, and I love how the glass skater shatters to pieces after a failed trick. Less chilly are the occasional collision issues where the Skater clips through objects and, although less frequently, gets stuck in them. The most egregious example occurred in the final scene of the game, when I got stuck in a geometry trap during the final cinematic and had to restart the game several times, ruining an otherwise chilly moment.
Eating moons is also an attraction. These encounters are like celestial boss battles, where nail tricks drain your moon’s health bars depending on the quality of your combo, acting as an intense test of your speed and agility. The fights remain consistently entertaining as fresh wrinkles emerge. One confused battle pitted me against the laser-firing law enforcement demons of the Underworld. Another challenged me to chase the moon and perform tricks in its constantly moving shadow. These battles are kind of a large exclamation point and I’ve always looked forward to them. It’s therefore a pity that there is no option to replay previous chapters to enjoy these passages again; you can only load the latest checkpoint or start the game over, deleting your original save data.
As the credits rolled on Skate Story, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Despite its imperfections, I knew I liked it, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I won’t pretend that every metaphor or symbol spoke to me or even made sense. It’s a deeply poetic journey, and the way to enjoy any good poem is to focus on what emotions it evokes rather than a literal interpretation. In this sense, I will fondly remember the awe I felt at this artfully created subterranean world, the adrenaline rush of traversing the tracks as a shining beacon of resistance and perseverance, and the thrill of performing acrobatics so incredible that entire celestial bodies crumbled at the sight of my magnificence.
