It was almost three years ago that Skate Story by Sam Eng was announced. I remember seeing the trailer at the end of a presentation and being utterly enthralled. It was a weird feeling. On the one hand, this game was shaping up to look gorgeous and fully lean into its vibes. On the other hand, I’m unashamed to admit that I have always been downright awful at skating games. Yet, I wanted more than anything to delve headfirst into this experience. As the years went on, whenever something popped up about the game it rose up my list of anticipated titles. Now, more than three years after its reveal, it launches on Nintendo Switch 2 day and date with other platforms. This literal road through hell isn’t without issues. However, when the music kickflips in and the vibes become immaculate, Skate Story operates on a primal instinct of skating and survival.

As a demon made of glass, you sign a deal with the devil. In order to get your soul back, you shall devour the moons of the underworld. But of course, this cannot be done on foot. You will have to skate. As you advance through the layers of the underworld and meet a pretty bizarre cast of weird ‘lil guys, you perform tricks, battle philosophers and even perform laundry for the devil. There’s no beating around the bush: Skate Story is truly unique. From its gorgeous artstyle, presented through what seems like a million filters and lenses, to the way in which characters speak, it feels strangely poetic for something that is in essence masquerading as a sports game. But as you peel back the layers, it becomes clear that Skate Story is as much a game about its creator as it is one about skating. Pretty much every chapter consists of an ‘open area’ and a linear level. The linear levels are where the game excels. Oftentimes you need to reach the end of the stage by skating through the goal. Perhaps you will have to pass a number of gates, or make enough speed at certain checkpoints. With a thumping soundtrack by Blood Cultures, perhaps one of the best of the year, the vibes are simply unmatched. Rolling through levels at breakneck speeds while performing tricks never gets old. These tricks are vital as they are the only way to take down the forces that oppose the Skater. Each of the shoulder buttons is designated to the way your feet are positioned on the board. Combining this with either jumps (ollies) or powerslides and grinds gives way to a ton of combinations.

To that extent every chapter ends with a boss battle, where you use your tricks and accumulating score to defeat an enormous entity. Whether they are beings that want to stop you from skating, or one of the many moons you’re looking to devour, these bosses are almost structured like a dance. In an open park you can do tricks, grinds and other flourishes to extend your combo meter. Variety is key here, as tricks get stale if you keep performing the same one over and over. Once you’ve chained together enough combos, you can finish them off with a stomp in mid-air, to attack the health bar of the boss. It makes for an entertaining battle that relies both on your reaction timing, as well as your knowledge of how to best use the terrain to perform tricks at the right time to maximize your damage. They can be pretty spectacular, especially in the later chapters where the game combines the linear levels to become a race of sorts and you’ll need to make tricks along the way that can damage the boss at the end of the level. These stages are the lifeblood of Skate Story. They are engrossing and transcendent in a way I haven’t really experienced since something like Tetris Effect. The music, visuals and gameplay melt together into this unforgettable experience.

And yet the proceedings often come to a screeching halt, in large part due to the structure of the game. The aforementioned open areas are designed to let you skate around, practice new tricks and complete smaller tasks. Clearing out corruption or jumping over potholes gives you souls as a currency that can be spent on skatedecks, trucks and wheels to personalize your skateboard. The offerings are fine enough, but none impact any of the tricks or performance of your board. Given there are only two new decks in each gift shop I didn’t really feel incentivized to go out and collect a lot of souls, especially as progressing normally through the game already gave me enough to change the board to my liking. That made these open areas feel a bit hollow overall. There’s the implication of challenges, but not really a reward worthwhile to fully explore these areas, which makes it feel like the brakes come slamming down and impact the momentum of the story, especially given how many chapters repeat this structure. Only by the end, when boss battles and singular levels would follow one after another did I get invested again into the tale being told. But even then, the story feels like it’s ending five times before arriving at its final conclusion. Not a crescendo after a large build up, but instead we get encore after encore when the audience was already set to go home.

Visually, the Switch 2 version of Skate Story performs well enough in docked mode. The effects do often impede on the overall performance of the game, though. An inconsistent performance, especially in the busier levels, sees fire particles make the game drop from 60 frames per second to 30 and stutter somewhere in-between. In handheld mode, the resolution takes a pretty big hit and retains its uneven framerate. When you are speeding through the levels, you can feel that the game is struggling to keep up. While I do think it is intentional, this also somewhat hinders the cutscenes and story segments. You’ll manually need to push the A-button to continue to the next scene or line of text during a cutscene. Perhaps it is the way in which the game is written, which frankly isn’t always that straightforward, but so many times I was sure that I had skipped over some information as the scene moved on to a new character or segment without a clear transition. It ended up making the emotional hooks of Skate Story feel jittery and disorganized.

But when everything clicks together and you are on that skateboard, rolling down a slope through the underworld, Skate Story is truly out of this world. Performing tricks never ceased to look cool. Every time I crashed into a wall and shattered into thousands of pieces of glass it looked amazing. I would pick up my board and go again and again. Even the final devilishly difficult stages came together while that phenomenal score by Blood Cultures transported me away. There are some rough areas and structural issues that are hard to look past that are perhaps even more pronounced on the Nintendo Switch 2. But when I reached the credits and that original announcement trailer was playing in the background, I felt like I had come full circle. Experiences like this can be long-lasting even if they are a little rough, aren’t polished to a sheen, and occasionally show the screams from their creator. By the end I was left with this profound piece of art, something so utterly human. It is filled with love and passion, but frustration and despair, often stretching at the seams. I do not know Sam Eng, but I have a feeling that I got an insight into what he loves about making games. I may never be a skating game diehard, but Skate Story is a story worth sharing.