THE RED ODYSSEY: A ROLLER COASTER THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD IN "SKATE STORY"

There are few video games, let alone sports games, that so elegantly combine the vulnerability inherent to beauty with the visceral charm of action as Skate Story does. The player controls an expedition to escape the Underworld by skateboarding and eating the moon, a premise as bizarre as it is compelling. The lethal red spikes in the Underworld, however, give the game a brooding hue that we’ll follow throughout, in order to outline how red influences the game’s aesthetic, gameplay and philosophy.

THE RED STREAK OF DANGER: REDS IN "SKATE STORY"

The moment you jump on to your board, the neon-toned underworld of Skate Story engulfs you, as the vibrant tones of red have been not only used to colour the environment but also to signal the perils of the obstacles that lurk around every corner: red skates, red enemies, red gaps. Red stands as a reminder that you are always perilously close to defying the laws of gravity.

RED'S RECKONING: MASTERING GAMEPLAY AMIDST CRIMSON HAZARDS

Playing Skate Story isn’t just about showing off your awesome skateboarding skills, it’s about surviving an underworld odyssey where red objects will definitely, 100 per cent, kill you. The simple controls – tapping, sprinting and tricking to navigate the game – experience a tension with the red tiles through which the glass skater is fatally vulnerable: the genius of the game is in the juxtaposition of speed and safety with red danger.

THROUGH RED TINTED GLASSES: THE VISUAL AND AUDITORY SYMPHONY

Immersion is key to ‘Skate Story’s’ play, and here it is delivered by its aesthetics and sound design as much as by its gameplay. The brutalist landscape of the industrial underworld, with its pearlescent surfaces intersected by deadly red spikes and neon hazards, is beautiful in a daunting way. Combined with a lo-fi soundtrack that builds to the game’s surreal atmosphere, each kickflip and grind through the neon slaughterhouse feels like a dance of death in blood red.

THE CRIMSON PEAKS: OVERCOMING RED-TINTED CHALLENGES

The levels in the game – a playground of red-tinted danger and skateboarding bliss – are long catwalks and concrete ramps with red-lit obstacles below. ‘Skate Story’ holds out the possibility of skating exhilaration and the joys of tricks, then juxtaposes those with the risk of a downward-facing red death that makes any overcoming of each red challenge that much more rush-inducing.

PAINTING THE TOWN RED: THE CUSTOMIZATION AND COMMUNITY

On a deeper layer of the Underworld, dyed red, is a shop where players can create customised decks and parts, and spread the redness out even further. As with the word HEART, here the game cheekily speaks to how you can let the redness express itself in your own way. This is a pinprick of light in the dark of the red Underworld. Personal expression is in the frame. If you create your own deck, you might eventually share the deck you have chosen with members of the community. You can challenge them to a fight. If you succeed, they might begin to associate redness with this community – with you.

EMBRACING RED IN "SKATE STORY": THE GAME'S HEARTBEAT

But in ‘Skate Story’, red is more than a flourish or a warning flash of danger; it’s the game’s heart. It is skateboarding’s pulse of pleasure, its sanguine side of blood and skin, its red landscape caught somewhere between dream and nightmare, the red will to go a little further towards a moon made of meat.

UNDERSTANDING RED IN "SKATE STORY"

In other words, red is not incidental to the game experience in Skate Story but rather one of the game's central identities. Red patterns through the challenges, gameplay, and aesthetics to weave a complex field of experience, and Skate Story would not be Skate Story without its vision of the Underworld paved red, dangerous and beautiful, this colour of passion. To skate in the Underworld is to embark on a red journey, a journey as dangerous as it is beautiful.