Skate Story on PS Plus Isn’t a Skateboarding Game. It’s Something Else

A surreal, narrative-driven odyssey where skateboarding is your weapon, your voice, and your only escape from a hell of glass and pain.

Forget everything you know about scoring combos and finding secret tapes. When Skate Story grinds onto the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog this December 8, it brings with it a premise so utterly bizarre it can only be described as a work of digital myth-making. This isn’t Tony Hawk’s Underworld Tour. This is a poignant, psychedelic adventure where you, a demon crafted from “glass and pain,” must skate to the moon and swallow it to earn your freedom from the Devil.

Developed solo by Sam Eng and published by the ever-eclectic Devolver Digital, Skate Story has been a curious beacon on the horizon since 2022. Its day-one release on PS Plus Extra and Premium is a gift to subscribers, offering a risk-free portal into one of the year’s most strikingly original titles. But to download it expecting a skateboarding sim is to miss the point entirely. This is an action-adventure game, a boss-rush, a philosophical quest, and a story of fragility—it just happens to use a skateboard as its sole means of expression.

The Premise: A Deal with the Devil, Written in Glass

The narrative setup is your first clue that Skate Story operates on a different wavelength. You are a nameless, tormented entity, your form crystalline and brittle. The Moon’s light is a source of sleepless agony, and the only logical escape is to consume it. The Devil, in a classic Faustian twist, provides the means: a skateboard. The deal is simple, absurd, and epic: “Skate to the Moon and swallow it — and you shall be freed”.

This isn’t just set-dressing. Your composition of “glass and pain” is reflected in the game’s very fabric. The world is a shimmering, often hostile underworld. Your skateboard tells your story, accumulating scrapes, nicks, and wear from every grind and crash, a permanent record of your journey and failures. You are fragile, and the game doesn’t let you forget it.

Gameplay: Tricks as Combat, Combos as Language

So, how do you “play” a myth? Through skateboarding mechanics that are less about high scores and more about survival and expression.

The game wisely eases you in with basic moves like the power slide and ollie. But these fundamentals quickly become your vocabulary for interacting with the world. You’ll leap through gates to seal disapproving, disembodied eyes, spin through ethereal “soulflowers,” and grind across surreal landscapes to progress.

The paradigm shift is most evident in boss battles. Here, skating transforms into a frantic, offensive art. Simply performing tricks isn’t enough. You must chain different moves—Pop Shuvits, Heelflips, Front Pops—to build a combo meter. The game judges repetition, encouraging variety and style. At the peak of your combo, you launch into a devastating aerial stomp; the higher your chain, the greater the damage. These fights become cosmic chases where dodging attacks and navigating moving tracks is just as important as landing the perfect trick.

A World of Bizarre Souls and Surreal Humor

The path to the moon is littered with the underworld’s strange inhabitants, ensuring the tone is as much about wonder and humor as it is about melancholy. This is where Skate Story’s heart shines.

You’ll assist a cast of characters that includes a forgetful frog, a pillowy demon, floating skulls, and even a giant, talking trash bag that needs help taking down a “smelly monolith”. In one particularly memorable side mission, you chase the Devil’s sentient pants, which have sprung to life to avoid being dried after a wash. Accompanied by a ghostly rabbit named Rabbie, you navigate a hub world where you can customize your board with soul currency earned from stunts, making the experience uniquely yours.

Why PS Plus is the Perfect Platform

Skate Story is the ideal candidate for a PlayStation Plus day-one release. Its originality is its greatest strength, but also a potential barrier for players unsure about its unusual concept. By including it in the Game Catalog, Sony removes that barrier. For PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers, there’s no financial risk—only the opportunity to be surprised.

This move continues Sony’s strategy of bolstering its subscription service with compelling, often artistic, day-one titles, offering a value proposition that extends beyond blockbuster AAA games. For the solo developer Sam Eng, it provides a massive, ready audience for a personal, years-in-the-making project.

The Final Verdict: A Journey Worth Taking

Skate Story is a defiantly original fusion of style, mechanics, and storytelling. It takes the universal language of skateboarding—the grind, the flip, the air—and translates it into a new dialect used for combat, exploration, and emotional narrative.

It’s a game about perseverance and fragility, set to a versatile soundtrack that slides from melancholic horns to funky electronica. It’s a game where you can fail, see the shattered remains of your previous attempts littered in the environment, and try again. For PS Plus subscribers, it’s an unmissable chance to experience a piece of interactive art that confidently carves its own path. Don’t just skate through hell—listen to its stories, help its souls, and chase the moon.