demagogue on 3/5/2025 at 20:00
That's fun. He started with Doom maps & IIRC has always built his maps in Doom engines. So it's cool that he's stuck with a Doom engine, even though there's nothing especially Doom-like by the time you get to the Doom3 Engine (idTech4). But once he's picked that, Dark Mod is the best or anyway most advanced version of it, so that makes sense. I'm pretty sure I've seen him around the TDM forums, but it's been a while though.
Aja on 3/5/2025 at 20:17
I'm only one mission in, but I appreciate how they've implemented proper 3D audio with OpenAL, no config necessary.
henke on 4/5/2025 at 11:45
I finished it. 12h total.
That was good. I like how the gameplay evolves through each mission. Starting off very ghost-heavy as you sneak around and learn the layout and unlock critical systems, then the middle bit where you start taking guards out and freeing cats, and culminating in a finale where you gear up and go Rambo on the reinforcement crew that gets sent in. You CAN also just steal the Ship Authority key off one of the reinforcements and slip out quietly, but I preferred the loud approach. As a treat.
As for the end, it does sorta have the same problem as Quadrilateral Cowboy where it's a fun enough campaign but then at one point it throws a properly challenging mission at you and you say "ok NOW we're getting somewhere!" but then the game ends. I guess they wanna finish these games off with a big challenging mission where the training wheels come off and you gotta use everything you've learned so far, but the problem with that is that it feels like you're getting a glimpse of what COULD have been! Storywise, it's well paced and funny and easy to keep up with. The lead up to the finale is great, but the actual finale itself felt a tad incomplete and rushed.
Overall? Hmm... 8.5/10? It's really good, but... dangit... I WANT MORE!
heywood on 5/5/2025 at 14:26
It's disappointing to hear that, but it fits a pattern. Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving were like fan missions. Quadrilateral Cowboy was like a series of tutorials or demo levels.
I'm early in, so maybe I'm pre-judging the game, but I think it's misleading to call Skin Deep an imm sim. The ships are small and everything feels very staged. You're given enough resources and ship features in just the right places to get the job done, but not much freedom to go off script and make something emergent happen, or to develop your own playstyle. I'd call it stealth with puzzles, because I feel like I'm just sneaking around trying to figure out what the designer wanted me to do.
Aja on 5/5/2025 at 17:15
I see what you're saying, but I think there are enough systems here to allow for emergent play. Here's a quote from the (
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/skin-deep-review/) PC Gamer review that piqued my interest:
Quote:
Nearly an hour into an early level, I'd snuck onto the bridge of a ship through a vent and clocked the key I needed to escape hanging from the belt of a pirate named Franklin. Minutes earlier I'd been gifted a single homing grenade—a reward for safely evacuating the crew—and decided to test its destructive power on Franklin.
It bonked off his head, exploded, and nearly killed him, but he was pissed. Bullets started flying, Franklin whiffed his shots, and one flew toward the window behind me. According to the event log—yes, Skin Deep is the sort of game that's so systemic that you sometimes need an event log to decipher what just happened—eight things occurred in the following two seconds:
1. Soda (empty) destroyed by: Seeker Grenade (sorry empty soda can, didn't see you standing there)
2. Window shattered by: Bullet (This one's on Franklin)
4. Franklin destroyed (He suffocated, but Nina's fine thanks to her third lung)
5. Cat Key interacted with: WindowSeal Lever (Wait why did the window close? Of course, a different key got sucked out the window and bonked the emergency seal on its way, restoring gravity)
6. Lost in space: Cat Key (So long friend)
7. Ship Authority Key destroyed (I guess it was pretty dumb to set off a grenade next to the key I need to complete the level)
8. Ship Authority Key sent to Lost and Found machine (Thankfully, Blendo Games thought this could happen and spawned another)
9. Air Freshener created: Flammable Cloud (With gravity restored, a floating can of body spray fell to the ground and squirted)
I stood there cackling for a good few seconds after the happy disaster, piecing together the layered interactions that made it possible and pretending it was all part of a genius plan.
In a way small levels are almost a blessing; they keep the game from feeling too overwhelming.
demagogue on 5/5/2025 at 20:11
I think Brenden* is self-aware that he makes bite sized games coming out of a modding tradition. He's posted about it quite a bit, and I think or suspect the name Skin Deep in part acknowledges that.
Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving were perfect for the format. Quad. Cowboy & Skin Deep are interesting experiments where the concept is more ambitious than that format. But I guess ultimately it's okay. It's part of his style.
For the record, the game that Skin Deep reminded me most of was Void Bastards... Small discrete missions assaulting and stealthing through space ships to do the thing, just with more alt playstyles in Skin Deep. Void Bastards itself was a spoof of SS2, and Skin Deep is like a spoof of the spoof, which I suppose is what such a self-aware game should be. But it reminded me so much of that not only because of the setting and concept, but it hit the same kinds of pros and cons... Distilled bite-sized missions and imm sim flavored action, but so distilled they're almost puzzle like, and varyingly engaging and repetitious.
So far I've liked it though, although I'm not at all coordinated with the alt mechanics and am pretty bungling, kind of wishing it were still built on top of a core FPS so I could just shoot a guy push come to shove. I hope someday he gets back to his roots of the more walking sim type of stories like Gravity Bone & 30 Flights, or at least more developed walking sims. (We were playing Through the Fragmentation, and I think I thought this is the kind of game that'd be cool to see in the Gravity Bone world.)
I may come back with more to say more on this game if I finish it or get more late game in it. I've only done a few missions so far, I think not to the real meat of it yet.
henke on 6/5/2025 at 05:25
Yeah I definitely think the gameplay is emergent and immsimmy enough. I never found myself wondering about, or constrained by, "what the designer wanted me to do". (outside of the early tutorial-y bits of course)
The narrative is entirely linear tho, and you don't have any agency over that, so it's no perfect immsim.
heywood on 6/5/2025 at 13:11
I played some over the weekend but had to put it down, so I've only made it past the Little Lion interlude and onto the restaurant ship. So far, the levels are small and dense. There's richness but I haven't felt like there's much player agency or different ways to approach the game. To avoid spoilers, I'll use the example from the PC Gamer review posted above. For me, Franklin was guarding the exit and there was another guy wandering the area sticking close to him, so pickpocketing the ship key wasn't an option. The game had conveniently given me TNT for saving the crew, so I dropped it next to Franklin from the conveniently placed catwalk above him. It blew him up, I picked the key up off the floor, and exited. You can't take anything with you from level to level and there's no character progression, so you're limited to whatever tools the level designer laid out for you to use, which is too often a black pepper or banana peel placed right on the approach to a guard that you need to take out to progress. So far, each level follows the same basic formula of key hunting and dealing with environmental obstacles while trying to stay undetected and only taking out baddies when necessary, then you call in a rescue ship and the level repopulates with baddies and you hunt the guy with the ship key. Each level has it's own gimmick, item, or system to keep them from feeling too samey, but it feels like a series of variations on a theme. Given the length of the game (12 hours for Henke will end up 15+ for me), I can't help feeling like they could have made this all one big ship with a lot more player freedom and some variety to the objectives.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm still glad I bought the game. It just seems like the expanded development time and team offered an opportunity to paint something on a bigger canvas. When I'm done with this, I'll have to go back to Void Bastards, which I started but got pulled away from by real life stuff and sort of forgot about. There was more strategy and progression to it that I think I'm missing with Skin Deep.
heywood on 12/5/2025 at 11:51
Well, now I remember why I didn't get back to Void Bastards. While there is an element of strategy in picking ships to raid, you can't really predict whether stealth will be an option due to the randomized enemy locations. And dying really sucks because you lose your supplies. It's a bit repetitive, and a bit frustrating. After a couple hours of that, it was back to Skin Deep, which is actually the deeper game after all.
