The immersive sim is arguably gaming’s worst-named genre, as it really doesn’t tell you much. Aren’t most video games designed to immerse you, and aren’t they all, in a sense, simulating something? Trying to define what makes an “immersive sim” has long been a running bit among creators and players. I’ve previously joked that it’s a game in which you can flush the toilets, due to how oddly ubiquitous that feature is in games like Prey, BioShock, and other genre standouts. Sincerely, though, I think of immersive sims as games that give you a puzzle box with a multitude of solutions, and it’s up to you how you solve it. In that sense, Skin Deep is a great immersive sim.
In the sci-fi comedy Skin Deep, you play Nina Pasadena, an Insurance Commando whose job is to save cats who have been kidnapped by space pirates–so long as their coverage is active. One crew, The Numb Bunch, is causing all sorts of havoc, commandeering a number of ships and keeping Nina busy saving her feline policyholders. If the setup sounds ridiculous, that’s on purpose. Eschewing the dystopian darkness and unflinching seriousness of many, if not most, “im-sims,” Skin Deep is reliably laugh-out-loud funny, whether it’s the quips enemies grunt as you sneak around various spaceships, or the emails you read from rescued cats in between missions.
Played in first-person, Skin Deep flexes its im-sim muscles in levels that feel excitingly open-ended and demand careful planning, while still asking you to improvise on-the-fly when things go awry. Each mission has a number of locked-up cats to save and enemies to evade or eliminate, and there’s no one right way to complete these objectives. A cat’s lockbox needs a key, for example, and you can find those by pickpocketing guards, reading memos and tracking one down some place, finding a Duper–a ranged device that instantly duplicates whatever item you’ve shot at–and doubling an otherwise hard-to-reach key, or via other methods I won’t spoil.
Navigating each level physically is similarly challenging and rewarding. These overtaken ships are often full of guards, security cameras, turrets, and locked passageways, making each level a stealth mission from the outset. You’re never welcome, so you have to evade detection at all times or face the consequences of being caught. Nina is both too vulnerable to damage and too sparsely equipped to turn any mission into a run-and-gun action set-piece, though as I grew more confident with my abilities and understanding of the world, I found myself more quickly executing ideas and completing levels.
Airlocks, vents, trash chutes, and windows make for great shortcuts, but they’re more likely to be locked at the start of a mission, the deeper into the game you go. This means that any one action you might think to take likely requires a few difficult, or even precise, steps to perform, but I learned the language of the game and took advantage of it earlier and more often over time, as my trepidation began to dissolve mission by mission. I understood that I’d likely find unlock codes on sticky notes, tablets, or printouts left lying around. I knew that if I couldn’t find the blue or yellow keys, I could likely just seek out the vent unlock code and get into those locked rooms that way.
Even when I did stumble, sometimes failing was the most fun of all because, after carefully planning and ultimately ruining Plan A for myself, I’d have mere seconds to figure out a Plan B. Like Hitman’s Agent 47 throwing a hammer at the wrong head and having to act-like-you-belong his way out of a room of rich socialites, it’s in the messy moments between well-timed, well-executed successes where an im-sim truly shines, and Skin Deep loves a mess.
It’s not just you reacting to the in-game systems either, as the enemies in Skin Deep will respond to you too, occasionally resulting in surprising patterns that you can replicate later on. One of the coolest examples of this came when I accidentally set off an alarm, putting enemies on alert. They saw me duck into a vent, so they decided to purge it–sending a concussive blast across the entire facility. I escaped the vents unnoticed before the purge occurred but, thinking I’d died in the blast, the enemy soldiers returned to their normal patrols, which actually helped me out a lot–it allowed me to skip the step of manually lowering the alert, either by sneaking into the Bridge room or stealing a walkie-talkie and pretending to be a guard, telling the pirates that all is well.
There are no skills to unlock and no gear to purchase along the way. With flat progression, you improve by better understanding what you’re capable of and how the world will react to anything you do. One of the ways I leaned into eliminating enemies as my confidence grew was by causing fires or explosions from a safe distance. For example, I could take a stolen walkie-talkie, bash it against a surface to cause it to briefly spark, then chuck it far across the room so that it hits an exposed fuel line just as an enemy walks near it. Kaboom. Or I could find a Duper and a Hack Grenade, duplicate it twice over, then hack the ship’s turrets so that they’d gang up on and defeat a well-armored enemy neither I nor a single turret could easily take down on our own.
When I didn’t have Hack Grenades, I’d sometimes eliminate cameras by just chucking books and cat toys at them until they broke. Similarly, I could cause guards to become vulnerable by making them slip on a banana peel or by throwing pepper at them and sending them into a sneezing fit. Skin Deep, like all the best im-sims, has you constantly asking, “What’s this button do?”
In one of the game’s best touches, killing any enemy means not only depleting their health bar by whatever means necessary, but also popping their head off so that it appears in a gacha-like capsule. If left alone, the head will slowly float to a respawn area, sending the enemy back into the level. This meant I’d have to not just know how to dispose of an enemy for good once killing them, but also commit precious inventory space to their heads, or “Skullsavers,” until I could send them down a trash chute or toss them into outer space. The whole time, they’d taunt me from my inventory, and even deliver their lines in a muffled way if I hadn’t actively equipped them.
For every action, there’s a reaction, and because each level adds a new wrinkle to this ecosystem of gadgets and goons, it takes the entire length of the game to master it all. Despite that, I sometimes found myself relying on my go-to methods as time went on, so even as the game iterates on its ideas over time, some tried-and-true methods, like those described above, became rote due to their reliability. That left me having to actively choose to try something new at times, like when I stopped seeking out the level’s hidden cat keys and just started snatching them from the bad guys’ belts–it was riskier, but quicker too, so if I felt I knew their patrol patterns, I could safely pickpocket them.
A similar sense of safety and familiarity somewhat hindered the endgame of any level. After you save all the cats, a squadron of heavily armed backup goons arrives. To beat the level at that point, you can either kill them all–which is the hardest of the outcomes given how tanky they are–or find the Ship Authority Key, then hijack their arrival pod, turning it into your escape vehicle. You can scan enemies from a distance, like you can notes, so this merely became a matter of identifying the enemy holding the key, then orchestrating a way to get it from them.
This wasn’t usually easy, but given how open-ended the levels can be until that point, it felt like creative bottlenecking; my methods of claiming the key would change, but I never really thought of killing my way out of a level as Plan A, given how much harder that is.
But even when things did sometimes feel samey, the comedy of it all kept me engaged. Though its colorful world sometimes overtly goes for humor–the cats themselves are haphazardly thrown-together cubic character models, signaling the creators’ total disregard for dazzling visuals–the jokes are sometimes subtler. Between missions, the rescued cats and some other characters email you, and you’ll go the whole game having side chats that have little to do with anything, like trying to politely tell one cat why you can’t make their restaurant’s grand opening, or helping another work out the logistics of a cross-species human and cat skateboarding showcase. When I’d steal a walkie-talkie to trick guards, it was funny to hear Nina fake a gruff space pirate voice, funnier still when she’d deliver the line half-cocked due to grievous wounds affecting her at that time, and funniest of all when the pirates would nonetheless buy the charade.
The game could easily exist without these touches, and yet it adds so much to the world. I also adore many of the darker games in this genre, but Skin Deep’s intent to provide a different color palette, both literally and figuratively, to immersive sims is a welcome change in presentation. It’s hard to find any biting commentary at the root of it all. The setup isn’t trying to shed light on the inequitable, racketeering-like nature of modern insurance companies. It seems it’s the way it is just because the developers found it funny. And it’s true; it is funny that you’re a trained-to-kill “Insurance Commando” awakened from cryosleep each time a band of space pirates hijacks a vessel full of cat technicians. Don’t try to read into it.
Skin Deep doesn’t reimagine immersive sims, but it takes the level design principles that players have enjoyed for decades and recontextualizes them for its brightly lit, goofier-than-usual world. Sometimes, preferred routes to success can become too reliable and make very differently shaped spaceships the settings for some familiar outcomes, but much more often, it’s a game of clever actions and surprising reactions. It checks all the boxes of a great immersive sim, where each level is a puzzle box and you hold any number of figurative keys to unlocking it. And, yes, you can flush the toilets.
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