During its opening hours, Otherskin wowed me in several ways. The game seems ambitious, creative, and really sparked my imagination at first. Alas, it wasn’t to be. The dev very much has its heart in the right place and some of the ideas on display here are really something, but that doesn’t mean all that much when the resulting game is janky, buggy, and completely undercooked. It could have been something special, but instead, we’ll just need to make do with wondering what could have been.
Otherskin is tagged as a Metroidvania on its Steam page, but it’s actually a level-based action-adventure game. Sure, you can get abilities and backtrack to earlier parts of a level to access things you previously couldn’t, but these abilities are tied directly to levels. When you return to the game’s hub, you lose your abilities and have to reacquire them in another level (and even when returning to a level you’ve beaten previously.) On one hand, this allows levels to feel very different and make use of disparate skillsets that offer varied experiences. This isn’t a bad idea, really, but it is a little curious. Some abilities only show up in just a couple of levels and I would have liked to play with them more. One particularly cool ability is only in a single level.
The basic gist is that the protagonist, Alex, can steal morph abilities from certain enemies, which she’ll bring back to The Spire – Otherskin‘s hub. There are a good variety of these, including one that lets you jump high in the air, one that shoots a spray that’s useful for environmental interaction, and my personal favourite – the skywalk (which is only in the aforementioned two levels.) Levels have a good amount of things to find in them, including currency that lets you improve your weapons and abilities, blueprints for new powers, and health upgrades.
Alex mostly shoots at enemies, but also has a melee attack that can be upgraded to four hits, as well as a powerful smash that must be charged. The melee attack’s default string is too weak to be all that useful, however, and enemies barely flinch when you hit them, which makes it easy to get hit by their counterattacks. Alex doesn’t seem to have any invulnerability time upon getting hit, meaning you can take a huge amount of damage in the blink of an eye. Melee combat in particular feels poor and lacks impact, which is something that extends to pretty much all other aspects of the game’s controls, too.
Simply put, the collision detection is often off. The physics don’t fare much better either. On more than one occasion I was sent flying by the game’s physics. I’d randomly find myself flung too high into the air for no reason and in one instance, an interactable object pushed me all the way across the game map and into the out of bounds zone. Everything in Otherskin feels inexact and unpolished in this way. I’d say that it required months of additional polishing before it was ready. I also repeatedly noticed hitches upon entering another loading zone in levels.
As for guns, you get a peashooter, shotgun, sniper rifle, and sticky bomb gun that can all be upgraded. The sniper rifle completely outclasses everything else, and there’s little reason to use the others once you get it. Otherskin lets you lock onto enemies and I found that gun attacks either do too little damage or too much. Sometimes I felt like I was slowly chipping an enemy’s health away, others their whole life bar would melt to a single attack. Alex has a dash move that can be used to perfectly dodge enemy attacks, but this feels wonky. Pretty much every aspect of the way the game plays just doesn’t feel quite right.
It’s a giant shame, because there’s so much creativity on display here. The levels (of which there are 14, including a few levels that are mostly boss fights,) have really unique ideas that I felt were very clever, making them all stand out in some way. One has Alex jumping to little planetoids, another sees her rocketing skyward via boost pads. There’s even a level in space that sees her riding purple rails that reminded me of Ratchet and Clank. Not all the levels are good, though, such as a forced stealth level that has you awkwardly trying to get stealth prompts to appear over enemies while sneaking through tall grass. A level where you’re hiding behind shields to survive an energy storm is creative, albeit not what I’d consider fun.
I really couldn’t help but marvel at some points at how cool some of these levels are and how fun it is to use certain morph powers to get through them. That is to say – despite how janky and unpolished Otherskin is, it can absolutely be fun as long as you can sit with its many issues. I will say, some of the health upgrades and blueprints are too hard to find in levels. If you return to a level to seek them out, it starts you at the beginning and you have to basically play it again from scratch, even though this makes zero sense narratively. Simply letting you teleport between checkpoints would have solved this.
One level takes place on a spaceship that ends up ruined by the end. Returning to it later will see the spaceship doing just fine. You play through the level and see the corruption spread once more, right down to hearing Alex’s dialogue again. A couple of the game’s boss battles are just straight-up awful, too. One in particular, which has you shoot a large creature through an opening from above during a too-short window, especially got on my nerves. The last boss is pretty underwhelming, in addition to it being a pain to mess with due to how often it doesn’t seem to register attacks on its weakpoint.
There are plenty of other issues to find here and there. One major puzzle had me stumped solely because a piece of it, a conduit that needs to receive energy to power a door, simply wouldn’t activate from my energy attack unless I was in a really specific position when unleashing it. At one point, I found that the player could sequence break right to a boss battle by backtracking mid-level, only to find that the boss is undefeatable without a morph ability obtained later in said level. The game kind of feels like it’s in early access in this way, which isn’t really acceptable for a full release.
I didn’t have a terrible time with Otherskin, as I really did enjoy many aspects of its general design and art direction. But its gameplay implementation, alongside the bevy of bugs, glitches, and oversights massively drag it down during the seven-to-eight hours it takes to get through. If you’re expecting the game to be as polished as the dev’s other title, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, you will assuredly not find that to be the case. Instead you’ll find a collection of legitimately good ideas, soured by subpar execution that really needed some serious additional time in the oven.
Otherskin: Ambitious but incredibly unpolished, Otherskin nails some aspects while flubbing many others, resulting in a game that has some serious warts. – Andrew Farrell
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