Blendo Games' Skin Deep is the must-play demo of February's Steam Next Fest
Equal parts Die Hard and Metal Gear Solid, Skin Deep is the only game I can think of where you take out goons with pepper and hand sanitiser
Hello! Slightly later newsletter than usual because of a technical error, but here we go, still here on the day. It's Steam Next Fest week. This happy and surprisingly regular event is a great time to get your hands on some things you would usually try – as a result, I've uninstalled a few older favourites and I'm digging into a stack of demos to see what I should be excited for over the rest of 2025.
The last demo I tried was Dagger Directive, which promises to channel the old-school Delta Force and Ghost Recon games. It manages it, in so far as it's fairly lightweight shooting with a faux military skin. It honours those games by looking a bit shit and refusing to be respectful of your time, making you walk 200 metres during the tutorial so they can make a joke about not having the budget for a vehicle to ferry you around. It took me 20 minutes to get off the helicopter for the training because I kept getting bored while my commander spewed pseudo-military jargon at me, giving in to intrusive thoughts and hurling myself out of the helicopter into the lethal water below.
Still, it tickles my nostalgia as I adored games like this as I grew up. Yes, it loses points for describing the M9 pistol as a 9x18mm pistol because the M9 actually fires 9x19mm, but I recognise that I care about this more than most.
My favourite game from the Next Fest so far is Skin Deep, Blendo Game's cat-rescuing space-based immersive sim. I'm going to gush about it now, but look: if you're sat at your PC right now and Steam Next Fest is still going, you can play it yourself and you should. Right now, in fact. Don't worry, I'll wait, lurking in a vent gripping my black pepper.
I didn't fire a gun during the 40 minutes I spent with Skin Deep. Things are much more involved than that, with violence often ending up as a more drawn-out process, at least in this demo.
Your character Nina Pasadena is a frozen insurance policy included on most ships. If things go bad, you're thawed out to rescue the crew. The crew are cats. You aren't given any weapons though, as they are incompatible with the freezing process and no one thought to include a drawer on your freezer.
As a result, the simplest way to kill someone is to belt them in the face with a pack of black pepper before hurling yourself on their back and smashing them into a wall-mounted bottle of hand sanitiser, a computer monitor or even a sink. Then, you'll eject their head and toss it into space or into the trash to prevent their skulls from regenerating from some sort of sci-fi macguffin that makes their noggin float off to a respawn point.
There's something slapstick about this because no matter how elegant or controlled you are as a player, clambering astride your enemies to ride them around like a big-budget Buckaroo isn't elegant. I've managed to drop enemies by filling the air with a flammable liquid and whacking a walkie-talkie against a wall to make it spark, before hurling it into the cloud of flammable goop. One comedy fireball later and there I am, detaching the mercenaries' head again.
The result of these awkward squabbles is that combat in Skin Deep feels more like an action movie than anything I've ever played. Die Hard is the most obvious touchstone, especially because each space pirate is named just like the terrorists in Die Hard, so you're messing up a person rather than a nameless mook each time you heft your improvised weaponry into the mix. That's not the only nod. You were frozen barefoot, and so if you walk across any glass you'll quickly find yourself with glass in your feet, needing to pull the shards out of your delicate feet before continuing onwards.
So far, so immersive sim. Something that's reinforced by the systems in the ships you're trying to protect. It's tactile, in that there are a lot of wheels and big chunky levers. A giant button will allow you to access every vent on the ship, or retract the metal guards blocking the windows to space. This might sound unhelpful, but actually, you can dip in and out of space at will without any ill effects, so the dark void allows you to navigate the ship safely and unbothered by those within it.
The world is inherently ridiculous but internally consistent, and while there's only one free-roaming level in the demo it's full of character with dumb jokes littered about the place as you explore the pokey little laundrette ship to rescue the trapped kittens within. I'm quite direct at this sort of thing, so I often took the most direct route to rescue the cats and remove the pirates. I can see the threads to smarter clearer options, but I'll keep bombarding folks with pepper, I think.
Skin Deep launches on April 30, and I would describe myself as agonisingly keen to get in deeper with the game.
Gibs
- I've found myself less online over the last few years because I've struggled to come to terms with how cruel it is and, to a lesser extent, how inured to the cruelty I was becoming. Heavily related, BioWare veteran Mark Darrah released a video entitled Your $70 Doesn't Buy You Cruelty that digs into player cruelty and the recent incredibly grim trend of celebrating layoffs. I haven't looked at the comments under the video, but I don't have high hopes.
- Activision has owned up to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 using generative AI. Gross.
- Warner Brothers has closed a few studios, including Monolith who created my beloved F.E.A.R.
Short and sweet for music this week (and I'm not talking about Sabrina Carpenter's phenomenal album.) Wolverine: Adamantium Rage has to be one of the strongest game soundtracks of all time, wild when you consider it was released on 16-bit systems.
