From the indie mind of Brendon Chung and the team at Blendo Games, Skin Deep is a quirky first-person shooter where you’re a barefoot insurance agent sneaking around starships, rescuing talking cats, and tossing banana peels at space pirates. It’s been a long time since it was first announced in 2018, but the wait has delivered something charmingly chaotic. Like a slapstick version of Deus Ex, Skin Deep blends immersive sim mechanics with nonstop jokes and colourful, blocky art. Sometimes the humour tries a bit too hard, but overall, it’s a refreshingly silly and inventive ride.

Are you insured?

In Skin Deep, you step into the shoes of Nina Pasadena, an operative working for MIAO Corp, an interstellar insurance company. Your job is a strange one: whenever a cargo ship full of precious goods (and even more precious cube-headed cats) gets raided by pirates, you’re thawed from cryo-sleep and deployed to save what you can and make it out alive. After a supposed bounty seems to have been put on Nina’s head, your right-hand cat Palanka and a litter of other friends seek to find out what’s behind this group of pirates’ motives. It’s a wild setup that immediately sets the absurd tone.

The story itself isn’t trying to deliver high drama or complex character arcs. Instead, Skin Deep leans hard into humour and personality. Between missions, you find yourself corresponding with the ship’s cats through light-hearted emails or, if you’re lucky, a short interactive cutscene. These exchanges cover everything from horror movie recommendations to bizarre side hustles like cow investments, fleshing out the delightfully offbeat world. It feels like flipping through the pages of a lo-fi comic book.

“Skin Deep succeeds by fully embracing its silliness.”

The cast of feline companions, including memorable names like Little Lion, Jingle, and Chu-Chu, are written with just enough individuality to make them feel more than just background fluff. Each cat brings their own playfulness to the table, whether it’s a strange obsession or a particularly dry sense of humour. While none of the story beats are particularly serious, that’s exactly what makes them work. The irreverent tone matches perfectly with the game’s busy, sandbox-style gameplay.

Skin Deep succeeds by fully embracing its silliness. The roughly 10-hour narrative doesn’t ask you to go on an epic saga or wrestle with moral dilemmas but simply invites you to sprint through zero-gravity hallways, sneeze uncontrollably, and rescue cats who just want to gossip. It’s a self-aware, goofy adventure that knows exactly what it’s doing.

Skin Deep Review – Silly Stealthy Space Cats

Welcome to the party, pal

Skin Deep offers a rich toolbox of tricks to survive and cause mayhem. You can hide in lockers, climb around vents like a xenomorph, or distract them with thrown items. Every ship becomes a playground full of potential disasters, and missions are cleverly structured around small, bite-sized objectives: rescue the cats, avoid (or eliminate) the pirates, and make it to the escape pod in one piece.

At its core, this is an instanced immersive sim built for experimentation. The game invites you to approach every encounter with a mix of stealth, assault, and creativity. You’ll always be given a range of ways to achieve your goal, such as tossing a bar of soap to send pirates slipping across the floor or using random debris to bludgeon enemies into walls, popping their heads off and disposing of them before their Skullsaver technology makes them regenerate a new body. The freedom to improvise is where Skin Deep shines brightest.

This smart design embraces replayability with multiple paths and rewarding experimentation. With Steam Workshop support already baked in, the potential for wild, community-driven levels promises even more beyond the base game.

Skin Deep does a great job of encouraging exploration and discovery, too. You can take your time inspecting items, reading hints about how to use them, or finding secret codes for things like unlocking jammers, vents, or trash disposals to dispose of Skullsavers. It’s a fun, puzzle-like element of the game that asks you to slow down and think, especially when planning creative traps or avoiding danger. However, trying to dig through these details mid-mission, especially during intense moments, can quickly become messy.

“…smart design embraces replayability with multiple paths and rewarding experimentation.”

Skin Deep definitely throws a lot at you. It’s not uncommon to lose important items in the shuffle or get completely disoriented after escaping a firefight or finding a new area. Clever mechanics like the Lost and Found system are a lifesaver for these moments. I once lost an item to space (oops!), but thanks to the Lost and Found machine, I could grab it right back and keep going. No frustration.

Combat is less about precision and more about embracing the slapstick spirit of the game. While you can engage enemies head-on with a weapon, it’s often more effective to outwit pirates with environmental hazards. Smashing windows to create sudden decompression and eject pirates into space, lighting up fuel leaks for explosive surprises, or sliding around vents like a deranged action hero adds dynamic, reactive energy to every scenario.

In my play, I often found myself falling into a reliable routine by stunning a pirate with a thrown object, leaping onto their back, collecting their Skullsaver, and dumping them into space. It was consistently the easiest and most efficient tactic, especially compared to the sometimes clumsy melee controls or the setup time required for more elaborate traps. While easier by design, it demerits a more offensive approach when you need it in a desperate shuffle.

That said, riding pirates to finish them off can also feel unwieldy. The controls for slamming them into specific surfaces are noticeably awkward, often making it easier (and less frustrating) to simply mash the bash button and hope for the best. It doesn’t break the game’s momentum, but it does mean that direct combat isn’t quite as polished or satisfying as the stealthier or more creative options.

Cartoon madness

Skin Deep is another Blendo Games’ signature in style, with low-poly characters and environments that lend themselves to the expressive world around it. The visuals, while not technically amazing, feel just right for the game’s tone. Chung, as well as Character Art, leads Tom Elgon and Mimi Kwan, craft a visual playground where every slip, cat debrief, and zero-gravity mishap fits naturally into the madness. It’s not “immersive” in a hyper-realistic sense, but it doesn’t need to be. The vibrant, chunky aesthetic makes every moment more charming.

The music, credited to Priscilla Snow, also deserves a special spotlight. About 30 minutes in, the game treats you to an incredible 1960s spy movie-style intro sequence and catchy theme song, complete with silhouetted pistols and bright colour splashes that feel straight out of a Bond parody. It’s a genuine celebration of the game’s identity, and you very quickly understand what sort of story you’re playing if you didn’t already. The team’s creativity is something more games could learn from.

“The vibrant, chunky aesthetic makes every moment more charming.”

Playful dialogue and a constant stream of jokes keep the tone breezy, though the relentless humour can sometimes cause a bit of joke fatigue. It’s also hard to appeal to everyone, so you may not connect with this humour at all. Still, moments like sitting across from a tiny cat lounging in a massive armchair, speaking in a deep, contemptuous voice, before it insists your human character squeeze into a tiny chair, are genuinely funny. Combined with the vibrant visuals, stylish soundtrack, and silly sound effects, Skin Deep builds a world that’s weird but unforgettable.

When your cover is blown amid the action, there can be a whole range of turrets blaring, alarms screaming, pirates shouting and shooting. The loud chaos is part of the fun, but at times it crosses the line into sensory overload, making it hard to focus or react cleanly. A few more options to tweak the intensity, like reducing environmental noise or introducing clearer audio prioritisation during heavy action, may have helped to keep the frantic energy without being too much for some players.

8

Great

Positive:

Inventive and fun immersive sim gameplay
Charming, colourful art style
Memorable and funny characters
Plenty of ways to replay missions

Negative:

Combat can be clunky
Some overwhelming moments
Humour won't be for everyone

Skin Deep is a wild, fun, and inventive immersive sim, rewarding creative thinking and playful exploration. Its unique look and comical approach to gameplay make it a memorable experience, despite a few mechanical issues and overloaded moments. If you love Blendo Games’ offbeat signature style, blast off into this universe where cats are the real stars and space pirates are disposable entertainment.

Skin Deep Review – Silly Stealthy Space Cats

Reviewed April 28, 2025 on PC