In 2022, Devolver Digital first announced a new game by the developer Sam Eng, titled Skate Story. With the game’s planned release window of 2024 being delayed to 2025, fans who have been waiting for nearly four years are sure to be wondering how development of the game has been going all this time. Luckily for those patient gamers out there, Devolver Digital released a small trailer on September 18 announcing that Skate Story will be coming to the Nintendo Switch 2, confirming the game’s status as still actively in development.
In Skate Story, you play as a demon made of glass, tasked by the devil to skate to the moon and swallow it. The visual and narrative style Sam Eng is employing for Skate Story is like no other skateboarding game out there, as the environments presented to you appear entirely otherworldly, but with enough of a feeling of realism to make them feel uncanny. As you go level to level— selling your soul for new gear to enhance your board—amalgamations of hand rails and manual pads contrast the harsh backdrop of what can only be rationalized as a layer of the underworld unfamiliar to the human mind.
An all-encompassing vision of the moon looms over you, its light refracting through your character’s glassy frame as a whirring guitar riff and crashing drums set you back on your board. The harsh-on-the-eyes aesthetic this game pulls off through its character and level design is enhanced by the incorporation of a thoughtfully selected playlist. Skate Story’s use of music, not only in its trailers but in early gameplay footage, goes hand in hand with the harsh atmosphere that Sam Eng throws the player into. The feeling that Skate Story evokes can be perfectly encapsulated by the animation that plays when your character falls off their board. As they collide with the ground—shattering into multitudes of pieces—the camera shakily follows along, crashing into the ground along with you. This sort of rough-around-the-edges animation gives Skate Story a feeling of realism despite it being vastly unrealistic in almost all other ways.
With over seventy skate tricks to learn and a moon to swallow, Skate Story has shown promise since its very first trailer back in 2022. Fan expectations have been set, and thankfully, now we have received confirmation that the game is still actively being worked on.