A Skate Story demo makes me long for the knee-breaking flow state

I want to eat the moon too. In Skate Story, you’re made of glass, and if you run, you’ll shatter into a thousand tiny shards. You’ve signed a four-page contract with the devil, who curses you with this fragile body but also blesses you with a terrifying skateboard to help you complete your mission to consume Earth’s only natural satellite. I’ve only just gotten my hands on a demo I shared at Tribeca Games Festival earlier this year, and I can feel the dreamy atmosphere of this demonic kickflip simulator echoing in my mind.

To put on my reductionist green visor for a moment, Skate Story feels like a cross between skating sim Session and surreal saunter-’em-up Tales From Off-Peak City. You skateboard along winding ramps toward a goal, heelflipping over spikes and powersliding through arches, collecting a currency called “soul” to spend on decks and wheels. But you also get embroiled in boss battles with the giant talking marble bust of an ancient philosopher. At one point, you encounter an enormous, grinning stone box in a sealed garden of knowledge. “I can’t utter anything but a smile!” it says, with great annoyance. It’s called the Happycube.

I risk appreciating the game’s deep, unserious voice more than the skateboarding itself (and the skateboarding isn’t bad!). Everything is said with a grand sense of weight and significance, turning the speech of rabbits and statues into a kind of boastful poetry that makes me smile with the same appreciation that only certain lines from Disco Elysium or the Catamites games can bring. “I noticed you’ve been skateboarding,” the philosopher says at one point. “A sin beyond sin.”

It helps that the game looks like a piece of modern art. Everything is coated in a destabilizing grain of wobbly sound, while the reflections from your character’s glistening body cast prismatic rainbows back at the camera. The harsh underworld has the feel of a realm under intense heat and pressure, as if at any moment everything you see will crystallize from gritty coal to sharp diamond. The ground beneath your board occasionally takes on the shape of a localized event horizon. Concrete blocks spawn dozens of tiny millipede legs and begin to walk across the level, only to retract into the cuboid stone as you approach.

The tricks (in the demo, at least) are simple – ollie, kickflip, heelflip, shove-its. And, for all the otherworldliness elsewhere, there’s no sense of hyperbole to your movements compared to something like the Tony Hawk games. It doesn’t feel as complicated or complex in its controls as something like Session or Skater XL. And there are subtleties in the angle of the analogue stick that make for relaxed manuals. Sometimes my hands – trained on years of OlliOlli – wish it were faster, more responsive to my own twitchy pace. But the game doesn’t waver in that, a pace I’ll learn to respect. Designer Sam Eng has mentioned elsewhere that the game is partly about flow state. And in the demo’s longer downhill levels, it really shows. It’s as if the abstract rhythmic divinity of Thumper has been brought into Lo-fi Girl.

We don’t get many skateboarding games, compared to the world of car racing or ball sports. And it could be 2025 before we see the next Skate game. I’ll be happy if Skate Story can close the gap.