Skate Story Review - A Fragile Indie Skateboarding Adventure

You are a demon made of glass and pain, who, after signing your soul away for a skateboard, sees the moon hanging high in the sky, looking bright and delicious. You will do anything to eat it.

No, that's alright, thanks, I don't need a mental health evaluation—at least not for this, specifically. Instead, this is the genuine narrative premise of Skate Story, a trippy, deeply psychedelic skateboarding game that's so different from anything else I've ever played, and yet has the enviable confidence to be exactly what it wants to be. After plenty of hype and significant delays, Skate Story is finally here. So does it cap off 2025 with a bang? Let's talk about it.

Skate Story finds itself in an odd position where watching a trailer for it can be a captivating experience in its own right, but doesn't tell you much about what the game is. And that's not an easy question to answer, either. Skate Story could ostensibly be viewed as a distillation of skating games like Tony Hawk or Skate through the flashy, presentation-focused lens of something like Tetris Effect or Lumines Arise. Or a psychedelic game like The Artful Escape or Sayonara Wild Hearts, full of bright, flashy colors, tight cinematography, and a story filled to the brim with bizarre but charming pretension, that just happens to also include skateboarding.

Skate Story is all of these things and none of them. Characterizing it as a mishmash of other titles does little justice to its aim of being an experience more than the sum of its parts. And its success in that realm begins, but certainly doesn't end, with its presentation. As the most obvious of this game's strengths, there's no better place to start.

Visually, Skate Story presents us with a style and cinematic flair that most AAA studios could never dream of. Its worlds are full of deep, neon, and sometimes deliberately oversaturated colors that pulsate with the game’s phenomenal soundtrack (more on that in a bit), and an impressive level of polish for what's primarily the work of a single developer, Sam Eng. The environments of Skate Story are nothing extravagant and even tend to repeat, but they're hardly the point—more so is the flashiness with which it presents itself. Bright lights and lens flare take over your screen as you transition through each portal from one world to another, smooth animations guide your transitions from a kickflip to a grind to a manual, a close-up camera angle gives every part of the game a uniquely cinematic flow, and even the death animation has your skater shatter into pieces while the camera itself crashes and rolls around the floor. It all feeds a level of flair borne of a passion and vision that few developers can manage. And to top it off, it runs quite well on the Steam Deck and has flawless ultra-wide monitor support.

Skate Story's soundtrack comes courtesy of both original and existing tracks by the band Blood Cultures - and as a background to the moment-to-moment feel of Skate Story, Blood Cultures' work is nothing short of phenomenal, earning them a comfortable place on my Spotify playlists going forward. It's hard to convey just how well the soundtrack, visuals, and gameplay mesh here aside from what short clips you see before your eyes, but trust me - this experience is very, very special.

Many of you may justifiably wonder if Skate Story delivers on the gameplay front or if it's merely a linear, audiovisual feast masquerading as a skating game. Ultimately, the answer is if you're expecting this glass demon to be your new Tony Hawk, you'll almost certainly be disappointed. But meet Skate Story on its own terms, and you may find the gameplay to be appropriately accessible but deceptively deep. 

Holding A will allow your skater to push off the ground with one foot to propel himself forward. B lets you Ollie, both a basic trick and ostensibly the game's jump button, while adding in trigger presses, bumper bumps, and analog stick movements can up the complexity for more points and combo chains. Mastery of Skate Story's trick system and movement is encouraged but never required - it feels amazing to launch from a complex trick into a well-timed rail grind, but rarely will the game require such competence with its movement in order to progress. Accordingly, my mastery of the movement usually took me about as far as lasting 30 seconds before shattering into a thousand shards. For anybody worried about it though, Skate Story does include accessibility options such as customizable health and trick damage sliders and an auto-trick mode for those just here for the vibes.

The core experience of playing Skate Story can most practically be broken down into three distinct parts that effortlessly flow from one to the other over the course of its six or so hour campaign. The first part, and arguably the strongest, is its more fast-paced, linear challenges that often present as platforming gauntlets easy to moderate on challenge but heavy on immersion. You'll rapidly skate your way through environments that require you to power slide around sharp corners, crash through barriers at a certain speed, and Ollie your way over small obstacles. These sections ramp up in challenge as the game goes on, but rarely require more than a few retries because difficulty is not the point here. Rather, this is where Skate Story’s various components most strongly fold over themselves and simmer into an audiovisual nirvana if you join it in the right headspace. When you're skating through a portal at full speed and leaping into a grind before just barely clearing an obstacle, all while having Blood Cultures' chill, trancey tunes blasting in your ears, the result is a blissfully deep flow state.

The second part of the core experience, which may surprise you, is the boss fights. You might think adding boss fights to a skating game is a death knell, but you'd be surprisingly incorrect. Bosses in Skate Story typically rely on you skateboarding around an arena or through a linear set of levels, performing an unbroken combo of tricks before pressing X to slam to the ground in the right spot to deal damage to your foe. The higher the combo, the more likely you take a decent chunk out of their health. And while the timer accompanying these segments may be stressful for some, I usually found its limitations reasonable enough as long as my skills weren't total ass. Except, they often were.

The third part of the game is the handful of spaces where Skate Story throws you in a small open area and tasks you with exploring, chatting with characters, or just practicing tricks at your leisure. It's a welcome respite from some of the game's more intense sequences, and even with a much slower pace, it never lasts long enough to outstay its welcome.

What does outstay its welcome, though, is the story. Skate Story repeatedly and exhaustingly tries to one-up itself in the realm of weirdness. What at first appears a strange but entertaining narrative quickly spirals into incomprehensible madness. And while this genuinely has its charms, especially in the first half of the game, the line between charming weirdness and tedious pretension is a thin one, and Skate Story fumbles it. Most egregious of its narrative sins is the frequent refusal to let 5 minutes pass before interrupting us with yet another chunk of strange, pointless dialogue, telling a story that feels like a long-lost ancient allegory that happens to include lots of skateboarding, talking rabbits, and doing laundry for the devil for some reason. It’s certainly funny and weirdly entertaining in spots, but I genuinely encourage you to start skipping cutscenes the second you tire of its bizarre shtick, because as soon as you find your attention tuning out, I guarantee it doesn't improve from there, and only serves to constantly interrupt the game's otherwise seamless flow. In a similar breath, it's worth mentioning that once the game's 9 chapters are through, there's a very brief epilogue that I won't spoil, but is genuinely so tedious, frustrating, and utterly pointless that I have no idea why it was included. It probably took no more than 10 minutes, but presented such a dull, irritating, and even buggy contrast to the rest of the game that I had no idea what the point was. But like a small red wine stain inside the armpit of a cashmere sweater, Skate Story's epilogue is annoying, but nowhere near damaging enough to drag down the overall experience.

As far as downsides go, a mildly irritating but skippable narrative and brief but poorly-conceived epilogue is hardly a dealbreaker for Skate Story. It's clear that this is a project of monumental passion, showing us an uncompromising vision that combines genres to spectacular effect. It won't be for everyone - not by any stretch - but if the trailers and demo intrigued you, I have a hard time believing that Skate Story could disappoint you much at all. This is a fantastic experience to cap off a stellar year in indie gaming, and one that deserves not to be missed.

ESSENTIAL