Every mission in Skin Deep, the first-person stealth immersive sim from Blendo Games, ends the same way. You play Nina Pasadena, an “insurance commando” thawed out of cryostasis aboard a hijacked starship, and your job is to release the ship’s feline crew before you can leave. The trick is that you start barefoot, lightly armed, and outnumbered, so clearing a level is about method rather than firepower.
Quick answer: Free every caged cat using keycards taken from the pirates, then reach a rescue pod to escape. If reinforcements are on the way, you can instead hijack the arrival pod the pirates came in on, or defeat every remaining enemy.
Free every caged cat to clear the level
The crew members are cats locked in cages mounted on the walls of the ship. A mission cannot be completed until all of them are out of their cages. This is the one non-negotiable objective on every level, so treat it as your checklist.
Cages open with keycards, and keycards are usually carried by the pirates themselves. That means downing enemies and searching the ship are the same task as freeing the crew. Many passages are also locked from the start, so expect to hunt for keys or for notes that contain passwords. You can reopen anything you have read from the Memory Palace menu, which stores the notes you have collected during the level.
Take pirates down and destroy their heads
You rarely win a straight fight, so combat runs on props. Scattered items let you stun enemies so you can pounce on them. Pepper makes a pirate sneeze, while soap or a banana peel makes one slip. You can only carry five items at once, and some wear out after a limited number of uses, so pick your tools for the room you are in.
Once you pounce on a downed enemy, you can slam them into objects around the level to knock them out. Downing an enemy is not the end of it, though. Every pirate wears a “skull-saver” device that lets the head detach from the body when they are defeated. If you leave that head lying around, it drifts to a Respawn Pad and grows a whole new body.
To stop a pirate from coming back, remove the head after downing them and dispose of it into space. Toilets and trash chutes both work as disposal points. Skipping this step is the most common reason a level starts refilling with enemies you thought you had already dealt with.
Escape or shut down the reinforcements
After the last cat is out of its cage, you have a few ways to end the mission. The simplest is to reach a rescue pod and leave. If pirate reinforcements are inbound, you have two other options for finishing the job.
| Ending option | What you do |
|---|---|
| Escape | Access a rescue pod and leave the ship. |
| Defeat everyone | Optionally take out all remaining enemies on the ship. |
| Hijack the arrival pod | Seize the pod the pirates arrive in to stop the reinforcements. |
Alarms, health, and how a mission fails
Pirates who spot you will try to raise an alarm to warn the others. You end that alert by interacting with the ship’s security mics or walkie-talkies. This matters for more than stealth, because health stations lock during an alert, cutting off your ability to heal at the worst possible moment.
Taking damage drops Nina’s health, and you recover it at health stations when no alert is active. If Nina goes down, her auto-defib kicks in and revives her before she bleeds out. That safety net is single-use per charge. If you are downed again after the defib is spent, you have to reach a health station before you bleed out, or the mission fails.
Use the map, Info Station, and vents to move
You always have a map that shows the ship’s layout, the airlocks and vents, and the state of powered items and locked doors. Use it to plan routes around guarded areas rather than through them.
An Info Station gives you extra detail on where important rooms, people, and utilities are, which is useful when you are hunting for a specific keycard holder or a rescue pod. If you lose an item out in space, a Lost and Found box can recover it.
Vents let you slip past enemy detection, but they come with rules. You can only turn around in certain segments, and dusty stretches make Nina sneeze, which gives away your position. Nina can also breathe in space, so breaking a window or opening an airlock lets you travel along the outside of the ship as an alternate route.
Mind your bare feet
Nina has no shoes, and that shapes how you move through a fight. Step on broken glass and it lodges in her feet and makes her bleed. You can pull the glass out, and the same goes for projectiles that get stuck in her body. Because so much of your combat relies on smashing enemies and breaking objects, watch where you walk after a scuffle.
Put those pieces together, and a mission has a clear shape. Down the pirates and take their heads out of play, collect keycards to open every cage, keep alarms quiet so your health stations stay open, then leave by pod or shut the reinforcements down. Once the ship is clear, Nina heads back to her space habitat between missions, where you can read her emails to move the story along, check in on the cats you have freed, and play any cassettes you found along the way.
