There’s no shortage of skateboarding games, and I feel like I’ve experienced most of them. Some are incredible, while others fall flat. The Simpsons: Skateboarding was especially awful, and Tony Hawk: Ride felt like pure torture. This year’s Skate has become a frustrating microtransaction-heavy experience.
Then there’s Skate Story. At first glance, it seems like another trip into skateboarding misery and discomfort. But in this case, that struggle is intentional and central to the game’s identity. While I wasn’t always fully sold on its surreal and bizarre journey, it’s clear that developer Sam Eng successfully blended that strange vision with solid, accessible skateboarding mechanics. The result is a truly unforgettable skateboarding game unlike anything I’ve played before.
Skate Story isn’t easy to explain, mainly because describing its story almost sounds like something you’d invent on the fly. You play as a fragile demon formed from glass and pain, stranded in Hell — though it’s officially called the Underworld. The Devil is very much present, and I know that for a fact because I’m wearing his pants.
He makes you an offer: freedom, but only if you can skate your way to the moon by flipping, grinding, and manualing — and then somehow eat it. For reasons that are never really explained.
Still with me? Because I haven’t even mentioned the frog barista or the subway train that has legs.
Do you continue to follow? since I haven’t even reached the frog barista yet.
I’m careful not to say too much, as I don’t want to ruin any of the stranger moments along the way. Just know that Skate Story is a deeply bizarre journey through an unsettling, otherworldly setting. Honestly, this isn’t the type of experience I usually gravitate toward. I tend to prefer straightforward, high-energy stories — action-heavy plots, personal rivalries, and military-style covers — more David Leitch than David Lynch, if that comparison helps. Still, Skate Story gradually won me over. There were times when the constant strangeness started to feel overwhelming, but overall, I respected how fully it committed to its surreal identity.
The narrative is delivered entirely through text that you can read at your own pace, with no voice acting or narration. You could argue the game might have benefited from a deep, dramatic voiceover similar to The Stanley Parable or Bastion, but the carefully crafted soundtrack makes up for it. Created by New Jersey band Blood Cultures, the music blends experimental and electronic pop, shifting in energy and mood to match each location and level. While this style isn’t normally my taste, I found it memorable and surprisingly addictive. It pairs perfectly with the abstract environments of the Underworld and its ever-present, nightmarish atmosphere.
Skate Story is one of the most visually striking and creative games I’ve seen recently, so don’t let its grainy, low-fidelity appearance deceive you either. Its hallucinogenic image of a neon underworld combines twisted blocks of New York City with carpets of stars, and jagged forests of spikes with shattered slabs of old buildings. It’s definitely something to see this crazy world reflected through a glass-only devil wearing sneakers.
Anguish in the Glass
The controls aren’t immediately obvious, mainly because they feel quite different from most traditional, sports-focused skateboarding games. Instead of assigning tricks to analogue stick movements like the Skate series or dual-stick systems such as Session, Skate Story takes an approach closer to the Tony Hawk games — but with the controls completely rearranged.
Basic tricks are performed by holding a shoulder button or trigger and pressing a face button, while grinds happen naturally when you jump and land properly on rails or ledges. As you progress through the roughly six-hour story, you’re gradually taught more advanced techniques. While the system isn’t groundbreaking, it’s thoughtfully designed, with new moves introduced at a steady pace to keep the experience feeling fresh. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially for anyone trying to unlearn years of THPS muscle memory, but it doesn’t take long to get comfortable with the game’s unique control scheme.
The stunts look fantastic in motion with the low slung camera that falls to the ground like a real thing every time you bail and shatter to pieces. It’s all extremely solid and grounded, which I appreciate. I adore the sensation of the powerslides and the slow-motion enders that are given to us when we succeed. Skate Story hits the mark when it comes to feelings.
It’s all incredibly substantial and grounded, and the low-slung camera makes the tricks seem fantastic in action.
The game uses a timing system for tricks that affects how high you can pop into the air, shown through an on-screen sketch that changes shape depending on the move. A marker travels along this shape at different speeds based on how fast you’re skating, and hitting the perfect moment gives you maximum height. Honestly, I rarely paid much attention to this mechanic. On the default difficulty, Skate Story doesn’t require extremely precise timing to complete levels or beat bosses. That worked fine for me, though players seeking a tougher experience might find it a bit too forgiving, since you can often power through intense-looking sections by simply spamming inputs.
Boss fights are handled in a unique way, requiring you to build long combos and “stomp” them down within a designated area to deal damage. These encounters can be beaten with some light button-mashing, but there’s plenty of room to approach them more thoughtfully. Choosing your tricks carefully and timing them well leads to stronger combos and faster victories.
The game also includes several small, surreal sandbox-style areas where you can skate around and complete different objectives, though some of these feel underwhelmingly easy. For example, a task that asked me to collect floating letters sounded like a fun callback to classic skating games, but most of the letters were placed right at ground level. This turned what could have been a brief, skill-based challenge into a simple back-and-forth collectible run.
The real standout moments for me were the high-speed sections, where you race from your starting point to a ghostly exit door, almost like a supernatural downhill bomb. The music intensifies during these sequences, adding to the tension, and I enjoyed the fast, trial-and-error format as your fragile demon shatters and you’re instantly given another attempt. I actually felt a small sense of disappointment each time these segments ended, wishing there were more of them.
Verdict
Without a stomach full of Guatemalan Insanity Peppers, Skate Story takes us to what is likely the most bizarre depiction of the underworld, demonstrating how difficult it may be to learn to skate. Skate Story is a thrilling ride that combines a weird, surreal world illuminated by neon and starlight with a strong base of satisfyingly grounded skate tricks. It’s undeniably one of the most unique skating games of the decade, even while I have concerns about its replayability and the restricted nature of some of its objectives (and I did occasionally lose attention when tapping through its regular text-based interactions).
