There is something inherently anarchic about skateboarding. For all that the world has done to try to mold it into an organized sport for Olympic prestige and major sponsorship deals, it has largely remained unchanged at its core: pushing a board around places you’re not supposed to go.
I was devastated when I figured out I didn’t have the drive for skating as a young kid. I couldn’t do an ollie on my first try, and that basically broke my spirit. I was of course inspired to pick up a board because I played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on the PlayStation 2 a lot, and doing an ollie, much less a kickflip, a varial heelflip, a pop shove-it or any number of other tricks was as easy as hitting a couple buttons in quick succession. And so, when my expectations met reality I was so bummed that I didn’t bother using my skateboard for anything other than as a mode of transportation ever again.
Regardless, skating remained one of my favorite things to watch. I was enamored by the work of skate photographers like J. Grant Brittain, Seu Trinh and Mike O’Meally in magazines like TransWorld Skateboarding and Thrasher. I loved the way these talented shooters turned sport into art, how they could somehow freeze a skater in time while preserving the kinetic nature of their actions. Even today, even though I don’t follow it as closely as I used to, I still stop and watch, enthralled, any video of a skater pulling off a particularly hard trick, or gap, or grind. Because for every single successful run we see, for every beautifully executed clip, there are a thousand messy, bloody, brutal bails we don’t.
Skate Story is a game about the bails. The crashes, the fuck-ups, the shattering-apart of a body as it meets concrete in unnatural and hardly-recommended ways.
It is a game that is as much about the “…oh fuck” of a poorly-calculated ramp launch as it is about the “fuck yes” of a landed combo. This is not Tony Hawk, it is Dark Souls with a board. It is slapstick comedy on top of gruesome bodily injury. It is failing to take into account the unique geometries of a crack in the sidewalk, so when your trucks pass over it you fucking lose your shit to the ether.
It’s about getting up and brushing yourself off, wrapping up knees and elbows in tape and gauze and trying the line again (assuming those bits aren’t poking out of the skin to begin with). It is a game about a place and a feeling. It is hard to control sometimes; bombing a hill means more momentum but it also means more fucking momentum, those sharp corners will kill you if you’re not careful whether or not they’re covered in demonic spike grass. It is a game about the pain in your joints and limbs and the fire inside you that keeps those limbs moving.
In Skate Story (Sam Eng/Devolver, 2025), you are a demon of glass and pain who has to skate through the seven levels of hell, devouring false moons as you go, in order to earn back the rights to your soul and escape to heaven. This is frowned upon in hell, which turns out to be a very bureaucratic place (and one that represents the sort-of psychic vibe of New York City, intentionally). Breaking the rules, disturbing the peace—all frowned upon to varying degrees of intensity as you descend. The bliss of the game comes in its simplest actions: kicking and pushing the board along, gathering speed, readying yourself to ollie—only to fuck up which buttons to press and transport yourself right back to eight-year-old you on the back porch failing once again to lift your own board up off the ground with your own goddamn legs. Oh god, I fucked it here too. Can’t even do a fucking ollie in the skating art video game.
But once I’m done being upset, I reconstitute myself and I try the line again. And I nail it this time. I feel no small amount of accomplishment—and then I fucking faceplant into a manhole cover. Shatter to pieces. Reconstitute. Try again.
Each level of hell presents us with a different challenge, whether it’s finding two thinkpieces to free yourself from the Philosopher’s Lyceum or recovering a pure soul gem to trade the stingy jeweler for one of the moons you have to eat. In order to progress you have to complete that task and some skating challenge, like beating a demonic entity in skate-combat or navigating a nightmarish obstacle course at cruising speed without crashing. Sometimes you have to do both at the same time. You can make a beeline for these objectives, or you can spend time exploring the area, letting the vibes, excellent soundtrack from Blood Cultures and John Fio, and the lack of time pressure guide you to finding unique ways of traversing each city block in each layer of hell by board.
There is a dreamlike quality to the aesthetic, which at times morphs out of typical behind-the-character third-person video game camera positioning and starts to emulate the look of fisheye lenses on video cameras used to shoot skate video parts. Fisheye lenses are part of the wide angle class of lenses, usually 10mm or less, meant to capture as close to a 180° field of view as possible. In practice this means that a photographer or videographer has to get as close to the skater as they can without actually getting in the way of their line. Other games have done this kind of thing—I’m thinking of Skater XL and Session, and to a lesser degree Skate 3—but there’s something intimate about how close the camera gets in Skate Story.
Skate Story is a beautiful game. It’s beautiful in part because skating is beautiful. Because New York City is beautiful. It fills me with a feeling I can’t quite put into words, a sort of swelling triumphalism that radiates to my limbs and extremities, puts a dumb smile on my face, and makes me feel like I am, for a fleeting moment, connected to something outside of mere video games. It celebrates the ingenuity of street skating so well by simply giving you a place to skate that feels real enough. It gives you a reason to love skating.
I am no longer in much of a position to ride a skateboard, much less start street skating for real. My joints burn, my back aches for no reason even if I sleep well, and most nights I’m not really sleeping all that well. Age and time and limitations have all closed that door. But I am still filled with wonder and awe at what those who willingly throw their bodies at the world constantly are able to do. Before the end of the year, I watched Chris Joslin jump a 20-stair set at a California high school that had been dubbed “El Toro.” I watched him ollie, and then for a solid five seconds the ground refused to meet him. He just kept fucking flying, man.
Skate Story allows me to tap into that feeling of elation and accomplishment… without turning my ACLs into mush. And that’s why I love it so fucking much.
