Skate Story review: a fine skating game with a big message about art

Sam Eng’s avant-garde flick sets a high score for skateboarding games

First announced in 2022, Skate Story is the brainchild of New York–based game designer Sam Eng, the creator of the arcade shooter Zarvot and a 2024 recipient of the Chanel Next Prize. It doesn’t look like any other skateboarding game on the market. It doesn’t look like any other game, period. These stylized visuals — a world of glass and diamond, wherein all primary colors seem filtered through a prism — have helped Skate Story gain a lot of buzz in the independent games scene over the past few years. Following two delays, it now arrives in the twilight of 2025 as one of the more anticipated indie games of the year.

As a skating game, Skate Story is… fine. Its low camera angle draws immediate comparisons to Skate, which just so happened to see its latest release this year. But unlike EA’s live-service behemoth, where players seem more interested in doing 25 barrel rolls off a high-rise than in actually skateboarding, Skate Story puts a focus on “realistic” tricks — the way the original Skate did back in 2007. Skate Story’s tre flip tutorial doesn’t happen until several hours in, for instance. And refreshingly, it’s one of the more complex tricks you can perform. No triple cork method 1080s here.

How you actually perform tricks, though, comes across as lackluster. You press Circle to ollie (on PlayStation 5). Triggers determine whether you’ll kick a kickflip or heelflip. Bumper buttons control your board’s spin, for tricks like shove-its and varial flips. You can powerslide and revert with Square. Yes, all of the buttons indeed neatly map up to a logical interpretation of how a skater’s feet are positioned on a board. But you’re still just pressing buttons. It lacks the physicality of, say, Skate’s Flick-It system.

The structure of the game also does little to compel messing around with its trick system. There are effectively three types of levels in Skate Story. Hub areas are centered around skating plazas with NPCs and stores. Those funnel you into the game’s main levels, the bulk of which consist of dashing through linear hallways, trying your best not to crash. Those stages funnel you into unmistakably boss-fight-shaped rooms, where you have to land tricks in specific areas to succeed. In theory, the plazas are where you’d putz around, but the rate at which you learn how to do new tricks is too slow to make putzing around feel interesting; the next step of the story is consistently more intriguing. Skate Story forgets the ancient skateboarding pastime of hanging out.

The “story” part is where Skate Story takes its biggest swings — and where it’s most compelling. The short version: You play as a demon made out of glass who’s struck a contract with the devil to skateboard through the underworld on a quest to eat the moon.

If that sounds like it doesn’t make sense, that’s because a lot of stuff in Skate Story doesn’t make sense.

The setting alone allows room for Eng to devise a string of surreal visuals that veer on random for random’s sake but work through sheer charm. A frog selling warm milk at a bagel shop. A talking trash can begging to be “picked up.” A rabbit complaining about strict subway fare enforcement. A bag of laundry that attains sentience and rolls itself to a laundromat where everything smells like gasoline. A pigeon with writer’s block. (I deeply relate to that one.)

The surrealism works against Skate Story in rare moments. During one level, I had to skate around a plaza and find three objects. I had no trouble grabbing the first one. It’s the other two that posed the problem. Even though I could literally see them, I couldn’t interact with them at all. Due to how weird (but polished!) the rest of the game is, it didn’t even cross my mind that the thing stopping my progress could’ve been a bug. I’d convinced myself that I was just missing something, that the game was offering some meta commentary about the nature of objectives in video games or whatever. Nope! Turns out I really did just have to reload the level.

But as I played, I came to accept that Skate Story, in its intentional strangeness, isn’t meant to be fully understood, and would continue to surprise me in new ways. I was particularly caught off guard by how weirdly New York this game is — not just the bagels and buildings but in how Eng captured the place’s vibes in a bottle to concoct a dreamlike interpretation of a city that so often catches the stray “It’s like the city itself is a character” cliché. Here, I’m so sorry to say, it really is.

At one point, I come across a skeleton sitting on a concrete bench, lamenting a broken heart, apparently caused by a woman he once shared a bagel with. He’s sitting near a subway entrance that bears a remarkable resemblance to the infamous Myrtle-Broadway station. (The station has gained notoriety for its pure-chaos vibes and its location — situated next to a distinctly American trifecta of fast food joints. Not only has Myrtle-Broadway become an unlikely tourist destination, but it also occasionally pops up in gaming circles too. Fighting game fans have requested that now-outgoing Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada develop a Myrtle-Broadway stage in the series’ next entry, while one Halo player painstakingly recreated it in Infinite’s Forge mode.) The scene is the artistic interpretation of advice that’s handed around among New York transplants: You’re not a true New Yorker until you cry in public. Bonus points if you do it on the subway.

Some of Skate Story’s imagery portrays obvious thematic messaging. (Why yes, Mr. Rabbit, trying to enforce fare evasion is an inefficient use of public resources.) Some requires more scrutiny and careful thought. And some makes it seem like I should be getting it but that whatever message is supposed to be grasped is going over my head, which incidentally is how I feel whenever I walk through the MoMA.

Regardless of the hit rate, it’s clear Eng is trying to say something with Skate Story. That alone puts it in a class of its own among skating games. Whether Skate or Session or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or even the lo-fi arcade hit Skate City, skateboarding games typically stick to one narrow message: Skating is cool. Skate Story fully acknowledges that — and then builds on it. In Skate Story’s vision of the world, the arc of a flawlessly executed kickflip is no different than Rothko’s stroke. Now go grab your brush.

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Skate Story is out now on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a prerelease download code provided by Devolver Digital. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.