Skate Story review: life’s a grind when you’re a demon made of glass

In 2025 – a year in which both a brand-new entry in the Skate series and a fantastic remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 & 4 dropped – Skate Story, from indie developer Sam Eng, is the year’s most exciting skateboarding game.

You play as a demon in the underworld, one with a body made of glass and pain, who decides that they’re destined for more. They’re going to devour the moon – all six of the underworld’s moons, in fact – and earn themselves an invitation to meet the Devil. Naturally, the only way to do that is via some gnarly skateboarding.

Skate Story: plot

As the name suggests, Skate Story is much more plot-focused than most other skateboarding games. Your progression through it is linear: rather than the typical approach of gradually unlocking more levels or areas in an open world, you start at the beginning and end at the end.

It’s about moving through a series of abstract environments, completing objectives, occasionally skating your heart out to defeat bosses, and spending just a little too much time talking to NPCs.

The skateboarding at the heart of Skate Story feels incredible. The controls are straightforward: your ‘push’ button lets you gain speed, another makes you jump (or ‘ollie’ in skate terms), and the shoulder buttons can modify your jumps into different tricks.

You can hop off your board and walk around, but you’ll want to skate whenever possible. As you play through the game you’ll learn new moves and open up your repertoire a little bit with grinds, manuals, reverts and more advanced tricks, but this isn’t a game built on seeking out high scores.

The skateboarding sits somewhere between Tony Hawk’s ultra-exaggerated mega-combos and Skate’s more naturalistic approach: tricks are tied to button presses and are very easy to pull off, while grinds happen naturally if you ollie onto a grindable surface.

Don’t expect to launch yourself into the air or pull off complicated grab tricks – there’s very little scope for vert skating here, with a big focus on street style. Because you’re made of glass, if you hit a wall at speed – or any of the game’s other obstacles, including low walls of fire, big spiky red spike bushes, and, perhaps most menacing of all, staircases that you really shouldn’t skating directly at, you shatter to pieces.

Skate Story: eat the moons

As you go through the game, eating the moons of the underworld, a familiar pattern emerges. Each new level gives you an open-world ‘hub’ area, where you can skate around, meeting NPCs (think giant skeletons, big philosopher statue heads, and other weird denizens of the underworld), complete optional objectives, go to the local ‘gift shop’ to change the look of your deck, and complete the objectives that will progress you through the game.

Describing the game makes it sound more conventional than it really is. One of the quest givers is a slowly-shrinking frog; a lot of the plot revolves around a bagel store run by a rabbit; in one level you have to do the devil’s laundry, then chase it down after it gets itself down from the line and runs away.

The objectives never get too ridiculous, though, and the game is fairly easy – these hubs are small enough that you won’t get lost, and while there are score challenges to complete and currency to collect I found that there wasn’t a lot of incentive to stray from the main story path.

Skate Story: two worlds collide

There’s a bit of an odd balance in Skate Story between the two words in the title. The ‘skating’ is, simply put, amazing.

Eng has absolutely nailed how cool good skateboarding is – the sense of speed, the consistency of the physics, how dope a kickflip can feel even the 300th time you pull one off, the excitement when you have built enough speed before a jump to add a good spin alongside your trick.

The game doesn’t put a huge emphasis on combo scores outside of boss battles (more on those soon) but instead revels in how good it feels to skateboard, how fundamentally cool it is. The ‘powerslide’ move, which lets you take corners at speed, is particularly satisfying to pull off successfully, even if you find yourself mistiming it and shattering more than you’d like.

The ‘story’ portion of the game – which consists of a lot of NPC conversations, cutscenes, some poetry, and eventually a full-blown Evangelion homage – is a little more hit-or-miss.

I adore Skate Story‘s ambition, the verve with which it approaches its moon-eating, demon-shattering conceit, and the last hour, in particular, is pretty stunning.

But it also veers a little too much into a vibe I’d describe as ‘haha, random!’ in some sections – some of the jokier moments and characters don’t quite cohere with the game’s immaculate vibes, and the game really loves to throw a series of discussions and cutscenes at you that don’t carry a lot of weight.

Skate Story: flip tricks

While the game may have peaks and valleys, the best moments in Skate Story are some of the greatest moments you’ll ever find in any skateboarding videogame.

There are several sections where you’re made to skate through linear levels as fast as you can, trying to reach the ‘gate’ at the end of each section to progress to the next, that feel fantastic, focused as they are on the pure exhilaration that comes from skateboarding fast, knowing the cost of a wrong move.

I found myself doing flip tricks and manuals when I didn’t need to throughout these sections, simply because I wanted to look and feel cool, and while the objectives along the way are usually very simple, the game makes movement so satisfying that you don’t even notice how easy the whole thing is when you’re in the middle of it.

Then there’s the boss fights, the moments where you take and swallow the moons.

Man, the boss fights.

If the whole game was just the boss fights, stitched together into a single game that ran about half an hour, it would still be worth playing. Generally, in these battles, you’ll be skating around an open area while a moon, or a bunch of giant bugs, or some other visually gnarly element floats around the screen. You need to perform tricks and ‘land’ them (you can end a combo by ‘slamming’ your board down at the end) within the enemy’s shadow to lower their health.

Skate Story: best bits

These fights are also when the game’s visual and aural elements are at their best. The soundtrack, from New Jersey indie electropop group Blood Cultures, is something a bit different from what I’ve heard in other skate games, and it suits the stranger vibes here perfectly.

When you’re in the middle of a battle and the whole screen is pulsating and changing along to the music, and as the beat drops the colour palette changes as you ollie into a huge grind – there’s nothing like that in any other skateboarding game.

If you’ve played Sayonara Wild Hearts – one of the best games of the last decade – the vibes aren’t far off from what that game achieves, but grungier.

The final stretch of the game, in particular, has some wonderfully inventive sequences, flitting you between different settings as the soundtrack and visual palette simply go berserk. In those moments, you get the truly beautiful experience of witnessing an artist realising their incredible vision, all while you’re spinning through the air and flipping your board.

Skate Story: game time

Skate Story wraps up in about five hours, and there’s no Tony Hawk-style ‘session’ mode to get you back – this is the rare skateboarding game that you finish and then put down and step away from.

Already, a day after finishing the game, parts of it are beginning to feel like a fever dream, and I wish there was a straightforward way to revisit its best moments.

You will shatter to pieces over and over again in Skate Story, but it’s always worth rebuilding and carrying on, for one simple reason: the game understands exactly how cool a skateboarding demon made of glass is, how satisfying a good power slide should feel, and the euphoria that comes from perfectly judging the speed and angle of an ollie into a perfect grind.

In its best moments, Skate Story is just an unbelievably cool game – and that totally makes up for the slightly more tedious sections.

Skate Story is available on PC, PS5 and Switch 2 from 9 December 2025.

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