Tony Hawk has dominated extreme sports games for too long. It turns out that skateboarding games, in particular, have been severely limited due to the birdman’s stranglehold on the genre. Most people think of skateboarding games as fairly dry and grounded depictions, with only a few exceptions, like the Tony Hawk Underground titles, which were more playful than the average skating game.
Sports games don’t typically focus on a narrative. They don’t. The fact is, most of the core audience for sports games or extreme sports are not interested, despite that athletes have their personal stories to tell. Sports at large are pregnant with possibilities, with the range of drama and stories that can be told. Even soccer has the basis for being a compelling underdog story within a JRPG framework.
What if Tony Hawk wasn’t just a guy in a generic skate park? What if you had flexible, physics-based skating mechanics and you played as a living glass figure in a surrealist depiction of hell itself? Would it be a story worth telling? Find out in our Skate Story review!
Skate Story
Developer: Sam Eng
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Platforms: PC, Mac OS, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 (reviewed)
Release Date: December 8, 2025
Price: $19.99
To be a demon in hell is to suffer eternally. Our protagonist, an anonymous demon, had had enough of his endless torment, forced to starve til the end of time. He discovers a mysterious skateboard wedged into a Corinthian pedestal, and as if fated to be the king of England, the demon yanks it free.
From that moment, the demon changed. He was no ordinary subject of Satan; his form became glass, and he became overwhelmed with an unquenchable thirst for skating. And skate he did. Only skating is forbidden at the lowest reach of hell, but the skater did not care. The only thing the skater craved was to devour all the moons in the underworld. And so he skated through the cosmos with a powerful case of lunar munchies.
Skate Story‘s narrative is undeniably weird and surreal. It’s replete with familiar mythic narrative devices, such as following a rabbit, outsmarting philosophers, and humbling demons. There’s even a deftly-written Greek chorus-style narration that sucks you into the story.
The music does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to expressing the mood and tone. Sonically, the soundscape is experimental and intensely psychedelic, perfectly complementing the look and feel of the graphics and the game’s narrative. The music is a strange blend of lo-fi and electro, with elements of pop.
The skater is almost like a Protean figure. A surrealist Prometheus, only his fire takes the form of kick flips, pop shuvits, and grinds. Doing tricks is so powerful that it stuns entities made of pure energy. These are the kinds of demonic forces that are so far out there that you can’t even comprehend their true form, so the game represents them as something totally abstract and non-representational.
The skating mechanics feel free-flowing and weighty. The animations fluidly transition and look natural… as natural as a humanoid glass figure can be. Getting around and rolling comes with a bit of heft. Tapping the cross button makes the protagonist kick and propel himself forward, with the square button used for breaking and drifting, which you’ll need to clear sharp turns and slow down, since you aren’t just a glass demon, you’re a speed demon too.
Yes, it’s true. Speed kills. It’s especially deadly for our transparent and frightfully delicate hero, who shatters into a million pieces when he wipes out. Thankfully, you can always hop off the board and walk around to take it slow. Crashing into shards isn’t as painful as you’d think since Skate Story is lenient with respawns, which come with no load times. You can even drop a spawn point on any flat surface, making retrying certain tricks on specific obstacles effortless.
For such a fantastical-looking game, the skating mechanics feel grounded. You won’t be pulling off the same range of tricks and impossible combos like you would in some of the Y2K-era Tony Hawk games, which veer off into the absurd. The range of motion and physics are impressively realistic.
The entire trick and combo system is improvisational. A lot of the time, I found myself getting sidetracked in the various hub areas, just practicing and trying new tricks and experimenting. When not getting distracted, Skate Story unfolds a little bit like a collect-a-thon, where the skater needs to collect a few objects of power to open the way up to a boss. The battles usually demand players to master certain tricks while dodging or dropping them on a downhill slope with obstacles.
The pace is fast, and the lurid and utterly surreal imagery is unlike anything in any game. Skate Story‘s abstract visuals defy convention and compound multiple effects like some of the most aggressive chromatic aberration I have ever seen. Motion blur is especially effective and creates an unbelievable sensation of momentum when rolling at top speeds.
Crashing out is a dizzying effect of the POV tumbling, conveying a convincing wipeout that you feel. It’s like your soul leaving your body. The mix of unconventional textures, unique shaders, strange architectural choices, and mind-bending spaces makes Skate Story stand out as something truly one-of-a-kind artistically.
One of the coolest things about Skate Story is how liberating it feels, showcasing the potential of taking extreme sports gameplay and reimagining it creatively. Freely skating and practicing between main missions, alongside light adventure elements like fetching something for someone or pulling off specific tricks for a downtrodden demon, lets you earn souls to spend on board designs, axles, or decals for customization.
That’s right, you collect souls in Skate Story, but this isn’t like in Demon’s Souls. Souls are earned from tricks and combos, which are used as currency to buy items like board customization options, but also sometimes story items. It’s a clever way to funnel all the effort into something tangible.
Skate Story takes the simplicity and purity of the joy of skateboarding and wraps it in a strange, dreamlike story. The quartz-like, shimmering protagonist is such an incredibly cool design, and his constant refracting and glistening as he skates is hypnotic and hallucinogenic. Even when he breaks into a million pieces, it’s satisfying.
Most skate games take themselves too seriously, sticking rigidly to the demands and image set by the league and its players. Skate Story shows that there was an underlying artistry to extreme sports and brings it to the forefront without compromising on stylish and addictive gameplay.
Skate Story was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a code provided by Devolver Digital. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Skate Story is now available for PC (via STEAM), Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Nintendo Switch 2.
