Skateboarding is hard. Really damn hard. The journey to mastery is one counted in years – or even decades.
Landing a kickflip while moving along? Sure, today there are wildly more complex tricks out there, but it’s still a tremendous achievement. It takes hours of investment and a deep resilience to failure to get there. But the moment you pop the board high, flick it with a foot just enough to spin once beneath you, and successfully commit to the landing, the reward is immense. It’s not an achievement recompensed in any kind of currency like score. Rather, to succeed is more than enough of a payoff.
Session: Skate Sim reviewDeveloper: creā-ture StudiosPublisher: NaconPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.
That is the mindset that has clearly founded the design of Session: Skate Sim. Certainly, it is not as hard as real skateboarding, but this is a game that is profoundly challenging, and one that makes you think like a skateboarder. The clue is in the name. Developer creā-ture Studios has strived to deliver a skateboarding simulator. In doing so, they’ve built something that does a remarkable job of capturing the essence of real skating; even if that approach sometimes comes at the expense of what makes for a consistently enjoyable video game. To deconstruct what that means, the conversation inevitably starts with an iconic series.
For many years, the Tony Hawk games triumphed in abstracting skateboarding tricks out to various series of button combos, letting players string together impossible trick lines that could pass through a whole level. The skill ceiling Hawk’s games offered certainly loomed high, but almost anyone could leap in and quickly skate like a pro, prodding merrily at all manner of buttons. Then, in 2007, EA Black Box debuted the beloved Skate, which at least alluded to simulation. Its innovative thumbstick-based control system inspired by the subtle foot movements of real skateboarding meant it felt much more directly informed by the sport that inspired it.
So many years on, creā-ture Studios has taken Skate’s lead and run with it, delivering something so committedly in simulator territory that it could be considered a genre-mate with Train Sim World as much as with the Tony Hawk games. As such, like real skateboarding, it is a hard, frustrating, and deeply rewarding experience. While the likes of the sublime OlliOlli games – with their emphasis on timing the landing of tricks – expertly translated the spirit of skateboarding into a playful video game form, Session is unashamedly devoted to realism. In its own peculiar, imperfect way, it captures more about skateboarding than any other game that came before it.