Skin Deep was this year’s reminder that it’s a privilege to recognise a developer’s handwriting

Out in space there are objects that orbit one another for so long, and at such a stately pace, that when they both eventually arrive at the same point, they don’t collide with some kind of awful explosion. Instead, they just touch. They graze. They fuse. It’s all very gentle. And then, over time, the two objects become one.

This is kind of how I feel about Blendo Games, the studio run by Brendon Chung, and immersive sims. This is the genre that’s all about taking things slowly, revelling in the atmosphere, reading the notes and the emails, going through drawers, and then picking your approach forward from multiple potential paths that are laid through the environments.

For years, us Blendo Spotters have felt that Chung has had a really good immersive sim in him. Games like Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving kind of pretend to be immersive sims, but they’re really linear cinematic games that are lofted above other games with similar ambitions because Chung seems to really understand the cinema he’s riffing on. There’s a chase at the end of Gravity Bone which is Road Runner, Midnight Run, Raising Arizona and the best bits of Thomas Pynchon combined. There’s a party in Thirty Flights that is as dreamy as anything the French or the silent greats – or the silent French – ever came up with. And the jump cuts! You never saw such jump cuts.

Then there’s Quadrilateral Cowboy, which brings Blendo a lot closer to making a game where you have choices and you can properly screw things up. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also a game about hacking, and the hacking comes to dominate my memory of the experience. A great game, but not quite an immersive sim.

I wrote much of this in my review of Skin Deep earlier this year, but I’m returning to it again because, over time, I think that for me at least this stuff is the purest pleasure that Skin Deep offers. I have watched this designer and this genre approach one another for well over a decade. I have watched them circle, arrange their orbits, and now, finally, they have become one thing.

And what a thing they have become. To do the video game maths, Skin Deep is Deux Ex with a bit of Die Hard, a bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a bit of Splinter Cell Conviction and a bit of a dozen other things I can’t call to mind right now. But it’s also 100 percent Blendo. This is that rare kind of studio that is able to make its inspirations feel like creative choices. Deep cuts! Splinter Cell Conviction, ffs! In 2025!?

You play as a kind of insurance agent all-round badass who is dispatched into deep space to connect with ships that are being robbed. It’s stealth, because you’re better taking foes down without being spotted, but it’s also Road Runner stealth, because you use bananas to trip enemies up and then their heads pop off and you have to flush them down the toilet before they regrow their bodies.

I could go on with the examples: the pepper you can spray, the fact that you can ride dazed enemies and ram them into walls, the fact that one level is a library and the next will be an observatory, the fact that you’re rescuing cats and pulling glass out of your feet to heal and phoning in fake all-clears on a radio so as not to give yourself away. But the point is this is a compact immersive sim. Each level gives you a handful of enemies, a handful of familiar toys to take them down, and a bunch of novel elements that come from the detailing of the environment itself. You read notes and emails and logs and all that jazz to understand where you are and how things work. But you also read them because they’re beautifully written and characterful and deliver a sense of a world that is so richly imagined and so thoroughly imagined that the developer only has to give you pieces of it in order to delight you.

As such it’s a sort of virtuous circle: the Blendo stuff feeds into the immersive sim stuff, giving you oddball locations and strange opportunities, and the immersive sim stuff feeds back into the Blendo stuff, encouraging the developer to flesh out the environments and write little letters to the audience that are filled with lore but also hints and clues and all that jazz.

And the sense throughout is that this is all so harmonious. It just fits. Skin Deep is the game that Blendo was meant to make, and it’s the game that a lot of us have glimpsed in all the developer’s other games, going back to oddities like Flotilla as well as straight-up bangers like Gravity Bone.

I spoke to Brendon Chung earlier this year for a magazine piece and was delighted to learn that he had such a comfortable budget on Skin Deep that he was able to work with collaborators. And being a decent fellow, he went as far as to credit each level designer in-game at the start of their particular mission. Sure, all games should do this kind of thing, but it’s still wonderful to see when someone chooses to do it.

What fascinated me the most about this is that, despite having all these voices in the game, all these hands on the code, it’s still a Blendo joint to its core. One of the things that is great about games is seeing handwriting that stays the same from one game to the next: the way an Arkham game likes to stage the approach to a boss fight, say, or the way that material physics from a Pixeljunk game turned up in a Pikmin game because Nintendo hired the person who did them.

And with Skin Deep this sense of reading familiar handwriting is everywhere. Here are the ideas and the influences that I’ve spent two decades getting to know. And they’re richer and joined by new stuff and filled with the work of other people, but the whole thing is also clearer to parse than it ever has been. What a game.

This article is part of our end-of-year series, Games of 2025, where we talk about great moments, great games, and our personal favourites of the year. You can read more in our Games of 2025 hub. Thank you for reading, and happy holidays!