Skateboarding is one of my favorite things in video gaming. Tony Hawk Pro Skater (THPS) was a mainstay of my childhood, and EA’s skate series scratched that itch through my college years. Maybe it’s because I, like many kids in the 90s, tried my hand at skateboarding (though I never got much beyond ollieing), or it could be because my 9-year-old has recently started his own skateboarding journey, but somehow skating always comes back to my life. Before Skate Story, these games all fulfilled a kind of empowerment fantasy, in which I got to be those that I idolized - someone who got good enough at skating that they could do all the tricks I never managed and now see mostly through Facebook clips. Skate Story, however, is a reminder that skateboarding can be a medium rather than the focus of a game and that it's as much an art as it is a sport.

You play as a demon known only as “the Skater”, a creature of glass and pain. They've been tasked by the devil to eat all the moons. As their name implies, the Skater mostly interacts with the world through skateboarding but can also walk around and talk with its fellow residents of hell, including a frog, a skull named Larry, and a bee flower shopkeeper. These encounters are mostly for comedic value, but there is a general sense that something deeper is implied by the events you see. This sense of missing some greater message is especially strong in the later stages of the game, where (without spoiling) things get a bit more meta. Sadly, I’m too much of a literalist with media, and most of this flew right over my head beyond the comedic value, but I still enjoyed the narrative as a pretext.

This chaotic narrative is married perfectly to Skate Story’s presentation. When you first start up the game you're given a seizure warning, and I can see why; there’s a kind of rough and constantly shifting nature to the visuals that could be risky to some. This is paired with a soundtrack that similarly shifts between chill grooves and intense rock, depending on the action. My only real complaint is that there were times when the soundtrack had such a dramatic shift in volume that I got complaints from others in the room.

In a deviation in style from its hectic presentation and sometimes nonsensical narrative, Skate Story’s control scheme is closer to the semi-realism of EA’s skate than the bombastic and over-the-top gameplay in THPS. Looking back, I think the biggest difference between the two is whether you prepare your flip tricks before you leave the ground or after. THPS allowed you to do whatever flip tricks you wanted while in the air, while the more realistic games require planning. For EA’s skate this was done using the right analog stick, and given this method’s adoption by other skating games like Ollieworld, I kind of thought this was the new industry standard, but Skate Story shirks those norms by using the trigger buttons to prepare a move and the circle button to launch into the air. R1 and L1 are used for spin tricks, while R2 and L2 are used for flip tricks, and they can be combined for more complicated tricks. Lastly, you can double tap the circle button to add a body spin into that. For instance, “L1, O” would be a shove-it, “L1, L1, O” would be a 360 version of the same move, “L1, L1, R2, O” turns this into a 360 kickflip, and “L1, L1, R2, O, O” will add a body spin to this move. Angle the move toward a ledge and you’ll add a grind to the end of that, or press square while in the air and you’ll “stomp” the board to the ground to finish your combo and cement your score. If I would add anything to the general control scheme, it would be an option in which the timing of your landing was more impactful. It felt like as long as I got off the correct sequence I was guaranteed to land the move even if the animation made it seem like the flip trick was only halfway through before I started my grind.

Changing controls from what I’m used to took some adjustment, but I appreciated how difficult it made performing the more complicated tricks. Trying to quickly tap out the necessary inputs while racing towards a gap was incredibly fun. When the game is using this well, it forces you to quickly rack up a score and then stomp this into a particular area of the ground to beat a boss or do different tricks within a sequence to break a chain.

There are, however, large sections of the game where doing tricks is superfluous, as your only goal is to get to the end of a specific area. I found myself absentmindedly tossing in tricks to these sections, and I appreciated that they were forgiving enough that I could quickly retry if my added flair made me crash into a wall or fall into oblivion. In a perfect world, there would be more sections of the game that combine these elements and force you to try to rack up a combo while flying down an obstacle course. The few times this did happen were by far my favorite moments in the game.

Other issues I noticed with the gameplay were bugs in which the Skater would go sideways when in the air near a short wall, changing a planned grind into a weird glitchy faceplant. This happened quite a few times but never hindered my progression. I also took issue with how the game deals with grinds. It’s obvious from the animation that different grinds are possible based on the angle at which you approach the ledge, but regardless of this they're all just called “grind”. An acknowledgement of the difference between a tail slide and a crooked grind would be appreciated.

I was also disappointed that after my six hours with the story were done, there was no easy option to jump back into the game and play around with the mechanics. While working through the story, there was a “skater’s dream” section that let you play around and go to any previously visited area of the game. Unfortunately, once you complete the main story, there's no such option I could find, and you must start over from the beginning to play again. While I enjoyed my first run through, I'm not so enamored with the controls that I would want to work my way back to just before the end of the game again just to experiment.  

While it’s not perfect, Skate Story is the best skateboarding game I’ve played in years. Recently EA’s skate series released a new iteration and, although it had the same controls I grew to love from playing through the first three games, I found myself losing interest after a couple of hours. While Skate Story could do with a free roam element of its own, EA’s skate decided to lean too heavily into free roaming and not include a notable story mode, so it lost any sense of progression, and that really hurt my interest in the game. Conversely, there are some who won’t enjoy Skate Story's blend of semi-realistic skateboarding controls with a completely bonkers narrative, but I found it compelling and would recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in skateboarding.