BURROWING IN

SKIN DEEP, Blendo's first game in seven years, is a small triumph

- By Morgan Park

Skin Deep lays bare a truth about the immersive sims we anoint to holiness: beneath a veneer of grizzled assassins and sunglassed corpo agents, beyond the virtues of player choice and nonlinear level design, is a genre by and for goofballs. The allure of a hackable computer or pickable pockets is catnip for troublemakers—a license to orchestrate pranks on NPCs who can’t send you to the principal's office, and laugh in their faces.

Immersive sims are the sacred virtualization of shenanigans, and Skin Deep is the patron saint of slipping on banana peels.

Death by peel is only the 15th funniest way I've solved a problem in Skin Deep, Blendo Games' latest, built with the 21-year-old id Tech 4 engine. In the bare feet of Nina Passedena, a MIAO Corp deep freeze insurance commando deployed to save crews of cats from invading pirates, I've sent guards into sneezing fits with boxes of pepper, turned soap into an explosive, flushed myself down a trash chute to make a quick escape and subjected an entire pirate crew to earsplitting jazz.

Such is the zany, charmingly Die Hard setup behind