Skate Story

Skate Story is a demonic little gem: tight to control, visually breathtaking and surprisingly approachable even at its wildest. A dreamlike trip where skating becomes combat, bosses get bizarre and style steals the show. Perfect for anyone craving an indie that dares to be different.

Skate Story is a perfect indie game, beautiful, off-kilter and unreal, with an absolutely killer soundtrack. Sam Eng can forget about eating the moon; he’s achieved something incredible down here on Earth.

But when everything clicks together and you are on that skateboard, rolling down a slope through the underworld, Skate Story is truly out of this world. Performing tricks never ceased to look cool. Every time I crashed into a wall and shattered into thousands of pieces of glass it looked amazing. I would pick up my board and go again and again. Even the final devilishly difficult stages came together while that phenomenal score by Blood Cultures transported me away. There are some rough areas and structural issues that are hard to look past that are perhaps even more pronounced on the Nintendo Switch 2. But when I reached the credits and that original announcement trailer was playing in the background, I felt like I had come full circle. Experiences like this can be long-lasting even if they are a little rough, aren’t polished to a sheen, and occasionally show the screams from their creator. By the end I was left with this profound piece of art, something so utterly human. It is filled with love and passion, but frustration and despair, often stretching at the seams. I do not know Sam Eng, but I have a feeling that I got an insight into what he loves about making games. I may never be a skating game diehard, but Skate Story is a story worth sharing.

Ambitiously creative, Skate Story delivers an offbeat and artistically memorable narrative adventure with some excellent technical skating sequences. It’s not without some issues, but its strengths and individuality make it well worth a look.

While I never had that phase where I was obsessed with skateboarding and Tony Hawk as a kid, Skate Story managed to trigger an element of nostalgia with its carefully crafted use of both style and substance. I can only hope that Sam Eng has more content to add to the experience at a later time, but for now, I’ll just settle for listening to the Blood Cultures soundtrack on loop.

In its current state, Skate Story is an excellent game that I absolutely recommend playing on Steam Deck OLED if you can, since the performance and load times on Nintendo Switch 2 hold it back from being an easy recommendation on Nintendo’s hybrid console. I hope a future update can cap the fidelity mode to 40 frames per second and optimize the performance mode to hit 60 frames per second more often, since it is a bit too variable for my liking right now. As for the game itself, Skate Story is easily one of Devolver’s best published titles in a few years and exactly the kind of game I want to see more of with its sublime aesthetic, brilliant music, and amazing feel.

There are moments of gameplay during the climax of Skate Story that are some of the most visceral, original, and downright impressive that I’ve experienced for a very long time. Its great-feeling skating isn’t always pushed to its limits, but the sheer craft, personality, and audiovisual flair throughout largely compensate. Overall, Skate Story is an enjoyable, offbeat adventure game with a striking, unique identity. It might not be difficult, but if its tone speaks to you, you’ll find plenty to appreciate for its relatively short duration: sliding at speed around corners, landing shove-its, jumping across crevices, grinding through crystalline underworlds, and, yes, eating moons – all to a superb soundtrack.

Skate Story is an enchanting sensory experience, one that Sam Eng set out to recreate by drawing on his nights spent in a nocturnal New York, headphones in his ears and a skateboard under his feet. It’s a bizarre tale, made of glass demons, talking rabbits, and capitalist penguins, an epic journey all the way to the moon. Defining it is a challenge: at times it’s an adventure game, at times a sports game, and you even end up using your board as a weapon against bosses. Everything feels original, even though the story, suspended as it is, isn’t always strong enough to fully capture the player’s attention. A greater focus on board customization could have added more depth, and certain choices—like the camera—lean more toward the aesthetic than the functional. But Skate Story remains a fascinating experience: a story about the skateboard not just as a means of transport, but as a tool for life and hope.