Skate Story isn’t confirmed for a Nintendo platform. Seeing that through a different lens sounds wonderful. Skateboarding games were always the most fun when the focus was on exploration and creativity. That twist is enough to make me stand up and pay attention. That appears to be part of Skate Story’s goal. Part of the hook of Journey is that it was something easy to replay and enjoy many times. If you don’t know, Journey is a heartfelt exploration game made by thatgamecompany that came out in 2012 and is available on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, iOS, and PC. Maybe the Tony Hawk and Skate legacy will live on in some capacity? But what makes me so excited about Skate Story is that it strives for something more than just “here’s a skateboarding game.” It’s the Journey-inspired part of the equation that is thrilling.

It feels like we’re nearing a potential inflection point, with games like Skater XL and Session nearing release. My time with Skate Story was brief, but as a huge fan of skateboarding video games, it struck a major chord with me. Kickflip over the big gap /Dd1ta1Jvgi- Skate Story March 4, 2020 You can do some tricks if you’re inclined, but that wasn’t the focus of the demo. Later in the demo it gets trickier and you’re forced to ollie over barriers. It’s simple at first, just roll down the pathway and periodically steer around obstacles and speed up by pushing off the ground. You control a crystalline skater, riding through the underworld, from a third-person perspective that is more evocative of the Skate series than Tony Hawk.

The demo was not so much a demo as it was a proof-of-concept prototype. By the time I finished the brief demo, I wanted to know more. That’s all I knew about it as I picked up a controller. However, the one thing I saw that took me all the way to 11 was Skate Story - a game pitched as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater meets Journey. I played a lot of interesting games at PAX East 2020, including a ton confirmed for Switch and coming in 2020.

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