TL;DR: A surreal, stylish skateboarding odyssey through a dreamlike Hell—gorgeous, strange, emotional, and just a little frustrating. If you want a skate game with soul, this one burns.

I’ve spent most of my adult life pretending I “used to skate,” which is the same thing as lying but with more wistful shrugging. The truth is simpler: every time I got near a skateboard, my bones filed a collective HR complaint. Some people see a deck and trucks; I see a small wooden promise that gravity always wins. And yet, maybe because I’ll never be good at it, skateboarding has always held this weird spiritual pull for me. It’s geometry, rebellion, rhythm, fear, and faith packed into something you can buy for thirty bucks at a yard sale.

So when Skate Story slid into my Steam library, shimmering like a melancholy mixtape about Hell and bad decisions, I didn’t expect it to speak to that old phantom version of myself. But it did. And it spoke in a voice that sounded like the underworld itself had spent too much time derailing art-school critiques.

This is a skateboarding game, yes—but it’s also a surrealist pilgrimage through nine layers of infernal architecture, a place where moonlight is currency, trash bags are doorways, and you are a literal glass-bodied demon learning to ride. As a premise, it’s absurd. As an experience, it’s enchanting. And as a piece of interactive art, it occasionally brushed against that rare territory where a game feels truly lived-in, like something someone had to make.

From the start, Skate Story looks and sounds like a fever dream spun through a lo-fi kaleidoscope. Sam Eng’s vision of Hell echoes a warped New York City—shimmering highways suspended in void, bodegas tucked between cosmic regrets, laundromats humming under neon ribs of concrete. It’s a geography defined less by cartography and more by emotional weather: those nights when the city feels impossibly big and you feel impossibly small, but you keep walking anyway because the alternative is stopping.

As someone who grew up upstate, I recognized the cadence of that urban melancholy even if I couldn’t fully claim it. This Hell is saturated with the very specific sadness of late trains, cheap coffee, and the vague hope that tomorrow won’t be exactly like today. But it’s also strangely tender. A city-shaped abyss that remembers what it felt like to believe things could be different.

And through it all, you skate.

The core mechanics are familiar if you’ve ever tangled with the vocabulary of kickflips and reverts, but Skate Story does something special with them. Tricks aren’t just inputs—they’re ritual. You preload a combination, pop the board, and feel the animation land with that delicious simulated vibration that good skating games somehow make better than real life. The camera shudders, the sound cracks, the glass of your body refracts every stray shard of Hell’s impossible light.

It’s beautiful. And it’s brutal. Wipeouts carry the same slapstick inevitability of gravity that haunted me in my teens.

Once combat enters the mix—yes, combat in a skateboarding game; we live in a blessed timeline—your trick chains become damage vents, translating your lines and combos into cosmic violence. Boss fights erupt into psychedelic storms of neon dust and demonic geometry. Reality bends. Music roars. You become something mythic for a few seconds, carving sigils into the air with your board.

The score system took time to click for me. I spent my first hours treating it like Tony Hawk with a theology minor, desperately juggling combos instead of simply skating. When I finally eased into the rhythm—letting score decay gently instead of panicking over it—the whole game opened like a lung finally remembering how to breathe. The satisfaction wasn’t in the meter; it was in the meditative motion. Speed, angle, space, flow.

And beneath all of it pulsed the soundtrack.

Blood Cultures delivers one of the most memorable musical experiences I’ve ever heard in a game. Their work detonates across the landscape, shifting from whispery dread to cathartic crescendos that sync with the level’s lighting as though the world itself is following the drumline. It’s rare for a game to feel possessed by its soundtrack, but Skate Story does—like the music is trying to tell the story just as urgently as the writing.

Speaking of writing: it is weird. Delightfully, aggressively weird. A kind of cosmic slam-poetry that treats grammar like a polite suggestion. Words drift between roles, sentences slip between tones, and occasionally the whole text feels like it’s obeying the same warped geometry as the levels. Normally this kind of thing triggers every editorial neuron in my skull, but here it works. Maybe because Hell shouldn’t sound clean. Maybe because sincerity, even strange sincerity, always cuts deeper than perfection.

Yet for all its spectral beauty, Skate Story trips over its own shoelaces sometimes. Linear sections leading into big setpieces can be surprisingly unforgiving—sharp turns placed a hair too tight, obstacles that come screaming out of the shadows like tax bills. A few times I rocketed face-first into failure at 30 mph just as the game was working toward something transcendent. It isn’t common, and it isn’t a dealbreaker, but it did occasionally sand down the magic.

And then came the ending.

I won’t spoil it. I won’t even gesture at details. I’ll just say it’s a crescendo of style and emotion so ludicrously ambitious that I laughed, cried, and questioned whether my GPU was legally allowed to show me something that biblical. There’s a frog. There’s liberation. There’s a moment when skateboarding becomes a theological argument.

By the time the credits rolled, I felt cracked open. Exhausted. Inspired. A little broken, but in the way the game gently argues is necessary. If you want something better than the world you’re given, you have to be willing to skate until you shatter.

And even then, get up.

Verdict

Skate Story is a hypnotic, melancholic, occasionally infuriating art piece stitched onto one of the most satisfying skateboarding systems I’ve played in years. It’s a cosmic pilgrimage on wheels, a love letter to New York City’s shadow-self, and a game that understands the emotional physics of movement better than most prestige indies. Not everyone will vibe with its surreal poetics or hellish aesthetic, but if you let it take hold of you, it becomes a quiet sort of miracle—rough around the edges, moody as midnight asphalt, and unforgettable long after you stop playing.