'It's like Die Hard but with more comedy': Immersive FPS Skin Deep has talking cats, banana traps, and enemies you can disable by making them sneeze

Space piracy is a real problem in the future, but luckily there's a new and exciting loss prevention system to meet the needs of cautious space travelers. That's where you come in. In Skin Deep, you're Nina Pasadena, a former assassin turned insurance commando, part of the deluxe insurance package for corporate starships. You're frozen and stuck in a drawer on the ship, to be defrosted and put into action if pirates show up and try to kidnap the crew.

Skin Deep is an immersive FPS from Blendo Games, maker of Quadrilateral Cowboy and Gravity Bone. Basically, it's like Deus Ex or Dishonored, but you can set banana peel traps for enemies to slip on and throw pepper in people's faces to make them sneeze so much they can't fight back. Also, you work for a company run by talking cats. (It's the future.)

"It's very light and very goofy," said Brendan Chung, creative director of Blendo Games, in the Annapurna Interactive Showcase today. "But it treats this light and goofy stuff very sincerely and very earnestly."

"It's like Die Hard but with more comedy," said Blendo Games programmer Sanjay Madhav.

Unfortunately, the cryotech process that turns you into an insurance popsicle doesn't allow you to freeze your weapons, so you'll have to make do with whatever you find on the ship or can take from the pirates. A banana found in a locker can become a slippery trap. Ragweed thrown at someone will stun them with sneezes (though if you step into the "pepper cloud" it'll also cause you to sneeze, which can alert guards). There are traditional weapons like pistols and rifles to grab, but isn't it more fun to turn on a gas vent, lure a dimwitted pirate over to it, flick on a lighter, and roast him like a Christmas goose?

There's a lot of neat systems you can glimpse in the trailer, like eliminating a pirate, taking his walkie-talkie, and then mimicking his voice when the pirate boss asks him to check in. You can also fake your own death by making it appear you've been purged from the ventilation system into space, so the pirates will stop looking for you. The pirates are pretty crafty themselves, though: the trailer shows one being killed, at which point his head is automatically encased in a cryo-dome so it can be placed onto a regenerated body, essentially making him immortal.

The solution to that? Flush his head down the toilet. Standard insurance procedure.

Skip Deep uses the Doom 3 engine, which is 20 years old and gives the game a "timeless look" according to Chung. Announced way back in 2018, it's finally almost here: Skin Deep launches on April 30. There's a demo on Steam available now.