Skate Story is one of those games that immediately caught my attention due to its striking aesthetic and ambience. Of course, a strong visual identity is not always enough to make a good game, but I am here to say that Skate Story is one of the most fun and standout experiences I had in 2025.
After my 10-hour journey with Skate Story, I was left feeling impressed, as if Sam Eng had somehow made a game tailor-made to my tastes, despite being someone who doesn’t really play too many skateboarding or extreme sports titles. You are a demon, cast into the depths of hell, tasked with consuming its seven moons to fulfil your contract with the devil. Naturally, this means you are given a skateboard to shred through the underworld, which in Skate Story translates to a bricolage of surrealist environments composed of urban brick and mortar institutions and city streets.
Skate Story’s aesthetic is a masterful blend of abstract vaporwave art, reminiscent of games like Rez, tinged with distinct 4th wall-breaking undertones of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Instead of being bound by flesh and blood, you, as the player in Skate Story, are of an ethereal crystalline substance, free to skate with reckless abandon, as your soul is bound to the devil, bringing you back again and again, no matter how brilliantly you shatter yourself into diamond dust against the pavement.
“Skate Story’s aesthetic is a masterful blend of abstract vaporwave art, reminiscent of games like Rez…”
Skate Story is broken up into nine chapters and an epilogue chapter, with the starting hours of the game focused on collecting moons. In-game, this translates to getting a high enough combo to whittle down the moon’s HP bar in a classic boss encounter mechanic at the end of the stage. Levels in Skate Story revolve around getting to a new area, learning a trick or gameplay mechanic in a semi-open skate park/ hub area, doing odd jobs for the denizens of hell, and then racing towards the moon or the boss of the zone.
The actual skating feels great in Skate Story, with the game easing players into things with its easy-to-pick-up but hard to master approach, which puts the emphasis on speed and building combos. Unlike something like, say, Tony Hawk, building momentum and doing tight turns in Skate Story feels more akin to a racing game, with your player avatar reaching an excess of 30MPH, making for some truly exhilarating moment-to-moment gameplay.
Doing tricks in quick succession before ending the combo by stomping is how you dish out damage against bosses and other hostile encounters. Generally, this is done by simply being in proximity to your target. Still, eventually, bosses will begin to move or even run away, giving chase and requiring the player to end the combo in specific areas of the map, such as under the glow of the moon, which makes for a truly unique and fun twist for a skateboarding videogame.
“The actual skating feels great in Skate Story, with the game easing players into things with its easy-to-pick-up but hard to master approach…”
Every time you do a trick in Skate Story, you earn soul, which can be used to purchase additional boards, wheels, and other cosmetics like stickers, which can also be found strewn about the map. There is a certain deliberate pretentiousness to Skate Story’s narrative and overall vibe, such as the philosopher’s bust that you must wow and a café-bound pigeon suffering from writer’s block. Instead of feeling forced or cringeworthy, everything in Skate Story just comes off as charming, or even cool, particularly one section towards the end of the game.
Unfortunately, at least on PlayStation 5 Pro, Skate Story suffers from some noticeable performance hiccups, which makes the overall experience a bit temperamental. Racing sequences and boss encounters perform at least a bit better than some of the semi-open areas of the game, making it possible to pull off combos without too much frustration. Even still, the uneven performance in Skate Story can be very noticeable, made worse when you crash into a wall or fail a grind, which results in further momentary slowdown. Despite this, however, I still very much enjoyed my time with Skate Story overall.
From its striking wash of chromatic aberration against the glow of the crystaline skater against the forboding hellscape of the skate park, Skate Story is a feast for the eyes and a must-play for skateboarding fans looking for a short but unforgettable indie hit.
