{"id":1234523,"date":"2025-02-24T12:30:10","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T17:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1234523"},"modified":"2025-02-24T12:30:10","modified_gmt":"2025-02-24T17:30:10","slug":"blendo-games-oddball-sci-fi-shooter-skin-deep-hits-pc-on-april-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1234523","title":{"rendered":"Blendo Games&#8217; oddball sci-fi shooter Skin Deep hits PC on April 30"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Blendo Games&#8217; latest installment of interactive weirdness, <em>Skin Deep<\/em>,<em>\u00a0<\/em>is due to hit Steam on April 30, after nearly seven years of development.<em> Skin Deep<\/em> is a first-person sci-fi shooter, but it doesn&#8217;t look (or smell?) like any of the dramatic space operas or realistic, precision-based games that generally flood this genre.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Skin Deep <\/em>takes place on a futuristic cargo starship managed by an insurance corporation and filled with its clients&#8217; valuables, and you&#8217;re the cryogenically frozen security officer kept on board in case something goes awry. Space pirates ambush the ship, your body thaws, and a non-linear game of shooting, sneaking, sabotaging and smelling ensues, all presented in Blendo&#8217;s signature blocky 3D style.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"end-legacy-contents\"><\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"ea90574b07fb402db74e58443a5290df\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4SvXMG8Ghaw?rel=0\" style=\"top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;position:absolute;border:0;\" allowfullscreen=\"\" scrolling=\"no\" data-embed-domain=\"www.youtube.com\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><em>Skin Deep<\/em> features a mix of puzzles, madcap comedy and action scenes, and alongside the first-person gunplay, there&#8217;s a sneeze mechanic and a stink system that sometimes leaves little smelly clouds in your wake, alerting nearby pirates to your presence. It&#8217;s like <em>Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2<\/em>, but with fewer medieval peasants and way more space cats. Did we mention there are a bunch of cats that you have to save on the ship? Because there are, and some of them are dressed in little cowboy outfits.<\/p>\n<p>For the odor mechanics, players become stinky only when it makes sense narratively, like when they&#8217;re expelled from the ship&#8217;s trash shoot alongside all the fish bones and rotten things. Your smell clouds subside once you figure out how to wash up. Sneezing follows a similar in-game logic.<\/p>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/creatr-uploaded-images\/2025-02\/37b61062-f2d1-11ef-adff-afa2cf625e2d\" data-crop-orig-src=\"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/creatr-uploaded-images\/2025-02\/37b61062-f2d1-11ef-adff-afa2cf625e2d\" style=\"height:720px;width:1280px;\" alt=\"Skin Deep\" data-uuid=\"f8f5e4e6-2493-302e-9fd1-8fc73e4ebbdf\"><figcaption><\/figcaption><div class=\"photo-credit\">Blendo Games<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>&#8220;If you&#8217;re crawling through a dusty vent your little sneezy air level will increase, then you&#8217;ll do a big sneeze noise,&#8221; Chung <a data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/skin-deep-brendon-chung-new-fps-steam-annapurna-192141277.html\">told Engadget in 2021<\/a>. &#8220;And there&#8217;s a bag of pepper that we have. If you shoot it, a big cloud of pepper flies out. You can pick up a pepper bag and throw it at someone and they&#8217;ll start sneezing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em>Skin Deep<\/em> is the most action-focused game that Blendo has ever made. The independent studio, led by Brendon Chung, has a lineup of award-winning titles under its belt, including <a data-i13n=\"cpos:2;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2016-04-29-quadrilateral-cowboy.html\"><em>Quadrilateral Cowboy<\/em><\/a>, <em>Gravity Bone<\/em> and <em>Thirty Flights of Loving<\/em>. These titles tend to highlight clever puzzles and polygonal oddities, and <em>Skin Deep <\/em>is the first Blendo project to feature first-person shooter mechanics.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say FPS development is a new idea for Chung. He got his start in game development by customizing levels in <em>Doom<\/em>, <em>Quake, Half-Life<\/em>, <em>Quake 2<\/em> and <em>Doom 3 <\/em>when he was a kid, and FPS games are often what he&#8217;s drawn to as a player. He&#8217;s still using a modified port of id Software&#8217;s <em>Doom 3<\/em> engine, idTech4, to make <em>Skin Deep<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve played like a bazillion FPS games because I just really enjoy them,&#8221; Chung said in 2021, &#8220;but I feel like there&#8217;s so much that can be explored and that I wish these games would explore.&#8221; You know, like well-dressed cats and stink systems.<\/p>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/creatr-uploaded-images\/2025-02\/37b61061-f2d1-11ef-a7ef-59b6e4cb7172\" data-crop-orig-src=\"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/creatr-uploaded-images\/2025-02\/37b61061-f2d1-11ef-a7ef-59b6e4cb7172\" style=\"height:1080px;width:1920px;\" alt=\"Skin Deep\" data-uuid=\"6d9ee9c1-dbd5-31eb-8cca-01e7e18acb54\"><figcaption><\/figcaption><div class=\"photo-credit\">Blendo Games<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>When we talked with Chung four years ago, the <a data-i13n=\"cpos:3;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/blendogames.com\/skindeep\/faq.htm\"><em>Skin Deep FAQ page<\/em><\/a> read, &#8220;Is <em>Skin Deep<\/em> going to take 4+ years of development time like your previous game <em>Quadrilateral Cowboy<\/em>?&#8221; And the answer was, &#8220;I hope not.&#8221; Today, there&#8217;s an &#8220;(update: oops&#8230;)&#8221; added to that response. Development on <em>Skin Deep <\/em>started around July 2018, according to the FAQ.<\/p>\n<p><em>Skin Deep <\/em>is published by Annapurna Interactive and it&#8217;s heading to Steam on April 30. A new demo is <a data-i13n=\"cpos:4;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/301280\/Skin_Deep\/\">live now on Steam<\/a>, as part of the Steam Next Fest hullaballoo. Steam Next Fest runs from February 24 at 1PM ET to March 3 at 1PM ET, showcasing a ton of fresh game demos and developer insights on the storefront.<\/p>\n<p>This article originally appeared on Engadget at https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/gaming\/pc\/blendo-games-oddball-sci-fi-shooter-skin-deep-hits-pc-on-april-30-173010803.html?src=rss<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blendo Games&#8217; latest installment of interactive weirdness, Skin Deep,\u00a0is due to hit Steam on April 30, after nearly seven years of development. Skin Deep is a first-person sci-fi shooter, but it doesn&#8217;t look (or smell?) like any of the dramatic &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1234523\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,44,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1234523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engadget","category-technology","category-unfiltered-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1234523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1234523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1234523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1234523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}