Giovanni Colantonio
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Writing For
Digital TrendsLatest Reviews
To make it in today’s cutthroat world, sometimes it feels like you have to be a taker to survive. It’s a ruthless mentality that makes the rich richer, crooked politicians more powerful, and countries more bloodthirsty. They take, take, and take until there’s nothing left for the rest of us, hoarding money, eliminating jobs, and destroying homes in the name of self preservation. Perhaps that’s what makes your typical video game so appealing. In something like Red Dead Redemption 2, players get to live out a true power fantasy: one where a world is theirs to take. Animals exist to be skinned, plants to be plucked, and corpses to be looted. Even in games where we’re meant to be the “good guy,” we’re often embodying the world of the worst. We become natural disasters that ravage worlds until we choose to stop playing.
How is a person expected to do a job with no resources? That’s the question that intergalactic insurance agent Nina Pasadena comes up against in Skin Deep, a miniature immersive sim from Blendo. Pasadena is tasked with protecting spaceships full of cats from pirates, but her corporate overlords haven’t given her much to work with. Banana peels, boxes of black pepper, and soap all become improvisational weapons because there’s not much else to work with. Can’t a girl at least get a gun?