Latest Skate Story Review

A stylish lunicidal skater with peerless vibes and devilishly sleek flip tricks.

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It's one of my life's greatest shames that I do not and cannot skate.

What is it? A skateboarding descent through nine surreal layers of Hell on a quest to eat the moon.Expect to pay: $20 / £18Developer: Sam EngPublisher: Devolver DigitalReviewed on: Windows 11, Intel i7-14700K, RTX 4070, 32GB RAMMultiplayer? NoSteam Deck? VerifiedLink: Steam

There's a simple reason: I never trusted I could do it without exploding my whole skeleton. Nevertheless I behold the skateboard with a kind of talismanic reverence. It's an implement that grants a different relationship with our earthly geometry. Skating is an almost occultic discipline, its practitioners defying worldly convention to dabble in transcendent matters of slope, rotation, and bodily contortion.

Skate Story takes that to an extreme. If Dante Alighieri had known that skateboarding could be a weapon of metaphysical rebellion against hell and reality itself, The Inferno would also have followed a "demon made of glass and pain" who's entered into a contract with the Devil to eat the moon in exchange for their soul.

Skate Story is one of the best-sounding and most stylish games I've played in recent memory. It's an esoteric art installation and interactive concept album navigated via powerslide and axel grind: a mesmerizing ode to the miserable occupants of an uncannily familiar underworld. It's grungy; it's grimy; it's almost certainly intolerable if the word "postmodern" sets you on edge. But my god does it make landing a clean heelflip feel very, very good.

Skate Story's melding of lo-fi assets and post-processing mastery is a flex in and of itself. The Skater is a literal mass of polygons in skate shoes, but their glass pane skin is beautiful to watch in motion as it refracts and reflects light while I grind Hell's curbs. Skating has immaculate animation and visual feedback: Simulated camera shake made for a delicious impact whenever I landed a trick after gaining big air.

Those flourishes only sing because the skating itself is tightly crafted. You prime tricks with button combinations before you pop into the air, so rather than cramming as many tricks as possible into the available airtime, building score is an art of ti

Source: PC Gamer