Airlock-hopping immersive sim Skin Deep is as playful as an ten-week-old kitten
In first-person stealth game Skin Deep you are a "deep freeze insurance commando" who gets defrosted whenever pirates board the space vessel you're aboard. The ships you work are crewed by talking house cats with big personalities and a poor track record in information security. It's your job, when things go wrong, to save them from their captors. We've seen a couple of trailers for this sci-fi Die Hard homage before but now we have a full demo to blast through, in which you can throw fishbones at elevator switches and overflow an entire laundry room with soap suds, useful if you want your enemies slip up and donk their heads. Just be careful, because it'll do the same to you. The demo takes about 90 minutes (if you're taking your time like me), but it already feels like Blendo Games at their most playful.
It's full of great dialogue, for one thing. When two guards discuss torture options for the hostage crew, they settle on shaving the cats for information. "Shaving cats is against the Geneva Convention!" mutters Nina from behind her steaming pipes and wall panelling, voice filled with disdain for these interlopers. Later, she finds the same guards running into lethal flame jets, but their life-saving skull-gizmos allow the pirates to ressurect and live in perpetual idiocy. They try to get past the fire again and again by mindlessly jogging into the flames. "Just sneak past it!" orders one freebooter, running in headlong and dying for the fifth time.
The love of colourful capers extends to your abilities and the useable items (everything comes labelled with funny instructions right on the object). Pepper can be thrown to daze a pirate. Soap dispensers let out a flammable aroma that you can spark by bashing an electrical walkie talkie off the wall nearby, or flicking a cigarette lighter on. You could also save that walkie talkie for later - if you've been spotted and set off a security alert, you can call in with a mimicking bad guy voice ("Uh, all clear") and
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