Skate Story
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Critic Reviews for Skate Story
A stylish lunicidal skater with peerless vibes and devilishly sleek flip tricks.
Can't sleep? Moon too bright? Want to eat it? It's a simple goal for a demon in the underworld, as you'll find in this gorgeous, extraordinary narrative adventure that just so happens to require skateboarding.
Fusing a solid foundation of satisfyingly grounded skate tricks with a bizarre, abstract world, Skate Story wobbles a little under its weirdness but there’s no doubt it’s one of the most distinctive skateboarding games of the decade.
The Skate part of Skate Story is very good, offering variety, pace, and a unique approach to boss battles. But it's less intricate by design than other skating sims, and that's to make room for the Story part. Your mileage may vary on this, and there's clearly a lot of thought gone into every element, but sometimes so much of it comes off as noise. Or maybe you're smarter than me, and you'll just get it.
It’s a deeply poetic journey, and the way to enjoy any good poem is to focus more on how it made me feel rather than any literal interpretation.
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 allegorical love letter to skateboarding that expertly captures the essence of skating’s humbling mechanical vocabulary like few other games do. Thoughtful and inventive in unexpected ways, Sam Eng’s boundlessly creative dive into an absurdist underworld is as nourishing as it is refreshing.
