Alien, Alien
“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”-Arthur C Clarke
These haunting words by Arthur C Clarke have always stuck with me. What if we go out into the far reaches of space and find nothing? What if we’re the only sentient species out there? What if there is something out in the great beyond? Would they treat us with kindness, or would they treat us like we treat each other? Would they want to probe our anuses?
I sure hope not. I’m not going to travel unspeakable distances on advanced spacecraft just so some big-headed grey alien can give me a colonoscopy. You can get that on Earth right now, and you don’t need a multi billion dollar ship, just schedule one with a Doctor. Wait, on second thought, maybe the ship would be more affordable.
Today we’re talking about Under The Skin, a little known game from Capcom where you play as an alien and go around pranking people. Disguise yourself as a functioning member of society and use our in-group preferences against us as you throw pies at people, shock them with bombs or set sharks loose on them, and change into another disguise just as you’re about to be caught. It’s like when the CEO of a company tanks it and goes into Congress.
This game’s not responsible for my paranoid delusions, but it sure did help. Read on to find out if Under The Skin is worth playing or if you’d rather have your secret alien neighbor give you a probe.
Gameplay
Under The Skin (2004) is a third person score attack game. You play as a little alien and your goal is to get coins by being a menace. You get an arsenal of weapons, gadgets and toys to prank the unsuspecting civilians in each stage. You disguise yourself as a human, cause mayhem, grab coins and piss everyone off. Repeat until you win.
To be able to move around the stage freely, you must be disguised as a human. You go up to someone and use your DNA gun to copy them. Then, you go to one of the many UFOs on the map and change into that disguise, which lets you walk around without raising suspicion, and gives you access to new gadgets, which are randomized. Each gadget only has one use; you activate it and it’s gone from your inventory. Once you use all your gadgets, you have to find another human to copy.
Every time you use a gadget on a civilian, they drop coins and get angry, chasing you as long as they have line of sight of you. While they’re enraged, they can hit you, leaving you in your underwear. If you get hit while in your underwear, you go back to your alien form, alerting everyone around you and losing a large number of coins like Sonic when he gets hit. Unlike Sonic, you can’t pick your coins back up, but your opponent can.
Each stage has you racing the clock against another alien, trying to get more coins than them. You can use your items against your opponent, and your opponent can do the same to you. There are a few rare stages that have you cooperating with the other weirdo to get a certain number of coins, but they’re usually there to be an obstacle.
It’s an arcade-style score attack game with some cool ideas. The fact that your gadgets have very limited ammo means you’re constantly on the lookout for new disguises, thinking of what to do next. Each randomized set of gadgets is like a new hand in a card game, each giving you new ways to be a public nuisance and get coins.
Gadgets
There are 44 gadgets in the game. I’d usually go over them one by one, but we’d be here all day, so I’ll be a lot less specific here.
When you disguise yourself, you get five randomly selected gadgets. You can see what gadgets each human has in their inventory before you copy them. Some gadgets appear more often in some stages, others are exclusive to a stage and some are tied to a specific kind of human.
They’re the usual cartoon fare. Stuff like a giant boxing glove that sends people flying, a giant bowling ball, a tornado, or a rifle. Common prank stuff. What’s up, YouTube, it’s your boy Roger Renfro and today we’re doing the rifle in a crowded place prank challenge! Smash that like button!
Each of these has their own use and attributes. There’s a shock grenade you can throw which shocks a large group for a long time. There’s a pie that launches a bunch of cartoon whipped cream pies out, paralyzing anyone in front of you, thumbtacks you can drop behind you, which people can step on, and a giant hamburger that usually misses.
There are also some less offensive, more utilitarian gadgets. There are roller skates you can use to move around faster, an invisibility pill that, well, turns you invisible, letting you dodge crowds, and a vacuum cleaner that sucks up any coins on the map, among other things.
Not all gadgets are created equal. There are a lot that have very obvious, rewarding uses, and some that you usually leave in your inventory collecting dust while you go look for something better. The boxing glove is one of the more useful gadgets. It sends everyone in front of you flying in a straight line, and if they hit anyone while airborne, they get knocked down, too. Using this in a crowd is an easy way to get rich quick. On the other hand, there’s the thumbtacks. You set these on the ground, and maybe one person will step on them. The thumbtacks are spread so close together that two people could be walking side-by-side over them, and only one gets hit.
There are some weapons that I still haven’t found a use for. There’s one that sends out three dogs. They go out and they wander around, lost and confused. I think they’re supposed to attack, but I’ve never seen them do anything. With that one, I think the prank is that the player uses it thinking it’s useful, but it’s, not. The joke’s on you.
Another is the invisibility, which has very situational uses, but it goes against what you’re trying to do. When you use a gadget on someone, they get angry, and they start chasing you. The more people you have chasing you, the more coins you can get, since you can hit more of them at a time. You want to carefully herd as many people as possible and keep using gadgets on them at all times. The invisibility makes you invisible, and everyone stops what they’re doing and looks for you. This might be useful if you want to set something up, but you usually just want them angry at you so they stay close and you can keep farming them for coins.
The way the gadgets are randomized can be a prank in itself. You can get stuck with one punch and four vacuums. There are some that are question marks, so you can get anything, but when you use them they’re usually something like roller skates or invisibility. You can preview what gadgets you’ll get from each person, but sometimes you can’t be picky and need to get something quickly, and you’ll have to settle for the guy with four roller skates and one tornado.
Then there’s the virus. Not only is it the worst gadget in the game, it’s possibly the worst thing in the game period. This is a fun little anti-gadget that has a chance to appear from a question mark. When you activate the question mark, it turns into a virus. If you use it, it stuns you for a few seconds. Once it’s revealed, the virus starts turning your other items into viruses, making them unusable. If the virus fills your inventory, you return to your alien form, losing a ton of coins. It’s meant as an obstacle, but it’s more of a punishment than anything.
All the randomness in the game and the constant need to keep swapping disguises and such is meant to keep you active. You need quick wits to keep changing gadgets on the fly. Then you get a virus and everything is screwed. It doesn’t throw a wrench in the works and make you change your plans. It’s just annoying. You can mitigate it to some extent. You can leave the mystery items for the end of your rotation, or you can switch your disguise quickly if you see it pop up, but that’s not an option a lot of the time. An item like the virus could be done well if it pressures you to react to it, but the one in the game doesn’t do that. Instead of thinking “Oh shoot! I’d better do something quick!” when it showed up, I found myself saying “Oh great. This again”.
The only reason you’d bother with the mystery gadgets is because they have a chance to be special, unique gadgets. Each character has their own special ability they can use. The main character Cosmi, for example, turns into a super hero, becoming immune to everything, flying around punching people. The inclusion of these in the mystery items gives you an incentive to use them, but the chances of it being a virus are skewed in favor of the virus, or you could get something less than useful like another vacuum or invisibility. In theory, this should make you want to use the mystery items, but in practice the chances of getting anything useful are so low they’re usually not worth the risk.
There’s also a weird subclass of animal gadgets. When you use them it summons an animal into the field, and they do something. These are usually incredibly random and backfire more often than not. I already mentioned the dogs that do nothing, but there’s also a T-rex, elephants and sharks. The T-rex is a very rare gadget, and it looks really cool and intimidating, but it doesn’t do much, it just stomps around a bit. The elephant gadget causes a mama elephant and her baby to run around on screen. They usually miss the civilians. The sharks spawn and they circle a large area and eat everyone, leaving their bones behind. Ah, the classic “reduce your friends to bones” prank. These sharks linger in an area for a while and they have a nasty habit of biting you if you don’t sprint out of the area before they activate. They can go through walls, and if your opponent uses them, you can get jumpscared by an ethereal shark from halfway across the stage.
The gadgets overall are a mixed bag. Some are useful, some are not so much and some are there seemingly as filler. My personal favorites are the boxing glove and electro grenade. They’re the simplest, but the most effective. They have huge areas of effect, and can get a lot of coins with little effort. The thumbtacks suck. They’re slow to deploy and they only hit one or two people, so you can’t get anything from them. Even if you place them in a choke point, their area of effect is so small that anyone can walk around them. A lot of them are useful tools and fun to use, but a lot of them, around a third of them, are underwhelming and could have used one or two more iterations.
Some gadgets can even invalidate an entire stage, but that depends on the stage itself.
Stages
The stages in Under The Skin are pretty good for the most part. They have unique themeing and some fun stuff, but they’re let down a bit by some of the game’s mechanics, which I’ll get to in a bit. They each have their own set of weapons, visual theme and panic time. Much like in real life, every few minutes it’s Panic Time. During this time, something about the stage changes and you have to adjust your play style to adapt. Each stage feels different and their gimmicks are pretty fun.
There are eight in total. Here’s a little summary of each.
Coco Town: A basic city stage. It’s laid out in a simple way, with a few out of the way rooms with some UFOs. Panic Time: The cars in the streets don’t do anything, but during Panic Time, they’ll hit anyone on the road. It’s easy to avoid, and I barely noticed it the first time I played.
Frontiersville: Yee haw cowboys! Rustle up some cattle in this here western-themed town! This one’s a bit annoying to deal with, like that terrible cowboy thing I just did. There aren’t any big, open places to gather lots of people, and the UFOs are scattered around on elevated walkways where you won’t find anyone. Panic Time: A sandstorm that would make Darude green with envy. It disables your radar and severely limits your visibility, making everything more complicated than it needs to be. Without your radar, you can’t find the UFOs, which are already put in inconvenient places. Combine this with the low population and narrow hallways, and you have a stage where you can barely get anything going. Not my favorite.
High Stakes Hills: Las Vegas! Go around a casino pranking bunny girls and obnoxious tourists. The stage doesn’t look much like a casino. It has a big, circular area in one part and a lot of weird hallways. Whoever designed this casino really phoned it in. You’ll be spending most of your time in the big, circular area farming coins. If you run out of UFOs there, you have to go into the hallways, which is a bit miserable. It’s a great metaphor for gambling in general: it’s all fun and games until you run out of money and have to go out into the depressing hallway that is real life and try to find a UFO, which in this case is a defense attorney. This metaphor is getting stretched. Panic Time: MONEY! Coins are doubled, and a giant coin dispenser flies around the stage. If you hit the coin dispenser, you get BIG MONEY. You can use the vacuum here and get tons of coins from out of thin air. I wish I could do that in real life, but in reality there’s no money vacuum. The only vacuum is the vacuum of space. Or the one I have to use to clean the carpet. The carpet of responsibility? Man, these metaphors are getting worse. Fun stage, all things considered.
Big Booty Bay: Sadly, this one is about pirates and not about big dumpies. This stage has more open areas to mess around in, which is always fun. Panic Time: This is one of the more unique/fun ones. When panic time activates, the pirates start bombarding the town. If you’re not disguised as a pirate, you get cannonballed. It makes the stage feel unique and it gives you a reason to pay attention to what you’re disguised as. To get a pirate disguise, you need to go to their ship, and if you’re dressed as a guard, they’ll attack you on sight. If you’re disguised as a pirate in the town, the guards will chase you. It’s a fun concept that I wish would have been used more.
Racooon City: Yes the Raccoon City from Resident Evil. Much like the zombies that populate the city, this stage stinks. There’s a basketball court area and then some hallways around it that connect to a somewhat open street section. There isn’t anything interesting anywhere. The gimmick here is that Nemesis is walking around, and you have to work with another alien to take him down. You hit him with stuff and he drops coins after he gets hit. It’s completely unfun. Panic Time: If you’re disguised as a zombie, Nemesis will put a virus in your inventory, regardless of where you are on the map. The virus spreads and hurts you. Nice use of the theme, but the virus is a terrible thing. You can ignore this whole gimmick by disguising yourself as the human soldiers. It’s a very boring stage. The version of Nemesis they got was the one from Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3, because he’s completely useless.
Pranksylvania: Another zombie-themed map. This one’s full of spooky graveyards and eerie churches. It’s the most gimmicky map out of the bunch. Here, there are grim reapers floating around near the graveyards. If you get close, they will turn you back into an alien instantly. Panic Time: The grim reapers start flying around the stage, and actively chase you. The only way to get rid of them is to disguise yourself as a priest and purifying them using one of the magic circles on the map. The stage revolves around this one thing very heavily, and it doesn’t play like the others. It’s not as weird and boring as the Raccoon City stage, at least, but it’s very easy. You can get a ton of coins by purifying people, which is satisfying, so it has that going for it, but
Pharaoh Island: Bowling. That’s it. It’s a stage with some statue heads that launch boulders that roll downhill. The stage is made up of three parallel slopes and one open area at the bottom. You can hang out at the bottom and farm coins. Panic Time: The boulders turn into gold boulders. Break them for some extra coins. I didn’t feel the need to do that since I could keep throwing bowling balls at a crowd at the bottom of the map with no real penalty. I’m mixed on this stage. It’s the closest thing to a flat stage, since you can stay in one spot, which is kind of boring. There’s not much incentive for you to leave one corner, but it’s also fun because you can get tons of coins and seeing lots of resources makes my monkey brain happy.
Cosmopolis: The final stage. You’re on a space station, and there are robots that want to shoot you. These robots are invincible to everything except the ray gun, which is only on some civilians. These bots are relentless and will chase you across the entire stage shooting you. The shots go through walls. There’s no way to escape them other than hitting them with a ray gun, which temporarily disables them. Panic Time: Meteors! The alarms go off and after a few seconds, the entire space station is hit with meteors, causing everyone not wearing a space suit to lose coins. You must be wearing the entire suit, which means you can’t take damage while wearing it. There are only two or three astronauts with the suits, and while wearing it, you can’t use any gadgets.
This stage is the worst, in my opinion. It’s more straightforward and less gimmicky than the one with Nemesis, but it’s still a nuisance. The panic time comes at around every three minutes, which gives you plenty of time to mess around, but the constant guard bots and the general annoyance of the whole thing makes it more of a hassle than it should be.
The stages are pretty nice, but they could use some work. The thing that really holds the game back is a combination of the enemy AI and the placement of the UFOs. You need to go into a UFO to change disguises. In theory this means you should always be on the move and using every part of the stage to do your pranks, but in reality, you end up looping between two nearby UFOs harassing the same crowd. The enemy hardly messes with you, so you’re never really encouraged to get out of your little cave and really interact with anything.
Besides spacing out the UFOs a bit, having more stage gimmicks would also encourage the player to move more. There are very minor interactable elements here and there. There are explosive barrels in Raccoon City, the magic circles in Pranksylvania and some weird balloons in High Stakes Hill, but they’re very minor and not very interesting. The magic circles were the most unique, since you need a specific disguise to interact with them, and they’re on the ground and don’t move, so you have to bring people into them to use them, which is always fun. There are some horses in the cowboy level, that you can hit and make them run around, but those usually end up hitting you. Maybe add some special set piece, or a new, more powerful gadget that spawns in one part of the map. An item that’s unique to the area and makes you stronger for a few seconds, and it respawns at different points in the stage so you have to compete with your opponent for it, like the power ups/power weapons in Quake.
As they are now, they’re okay, but with a few more touches, they would have been excellent. Still a better spread than the gadgets. Even Cosmopolis and Raccoon City aren’t as bad as the virus or the dog gadget.
This is a Party Game
There is a single player mode where you go through every stage against a CPU opponent, but this game was meant to be played in multiplayer. It’s incredibly obvious after a few rounds against the AI. A human player would interact with you more, be more malicious, and give the more PVP focused gadgets like the rifle more use. Playing this in singleplayer is like playing a fighting game against the CPU. You never really know what it’s like until you play it with someone who knows what they’re doing, and I only played it against the CPU, so a lot of what I say doesn’t apply when playing with others.
Going off what I played and the kind of game this is, this would make a great party game. It’s easy to learn, chaotic enough to be interesting, it has some strategy to it and there are a lot of things you can do to mess with your opponent. There’s also an unlockable co-op mode where you can work with someone else to accumulate as many coins as possible in a time limit.
If I had played this as a kid, I would have had a blast with it.
Presentation
Under The Skin has a very 2000s colorful style that looks great. The characters have these weird/cutesy designs that make them look like little vinyl figures, which were big at the time. There are a lot of characteristically early 2000s sensibilities on display, too. Styles come in 20 year cycles, and the stuff from that era is heavily inspired by the 70s, with these psychedelic styled elements. The colors are all really bright and nice, and everything has thick, black outlines. It’s a treat to look at, and it stays readable even when you have a crowd of people puking up coins.
Each stage is full of a lot of little characters with a lot of variety. There are big guys, skinny girls, fat guys, tiny kids, zombies of all shapes and sizes. Everyone in each stage is dressed in themed costumes. The frontier stage is full of cowboys, there are pirates and old timey navy guards in Big Booty Bay, gamblers and thieves in the casino stage. They don’t change much in terms of gameplay, but I really appreciate the visual variety. It gives every stage its own unique flavor.
The music is okay. I didn’t notice any stand-out tracks, but I didn’t find anything I hated, either. Each track is a one minute loop, and they play over ten minutes in each stage and they don’t get boring or annoying. Listening to them a bit outside of the game, they’re pretty nice. Some good electronic compositions that, like the graphical style, has some 70s influence with some funky tones and guitars that go “bwaaoow”.
Solid presentation with some great cel-shaded art and some okay if somewhat forgettable music.
Side Quest: The Name
What’s up with this game’s name? Under The Skin? It’s off-putting. It sounds like a horror game. I know it has to do with the whole disguise mechanic, but it’s not very descriptive. This game didn’t do so well when it released, partly due to the critics, but I think a lot of that was due to the name. It was a brand new game with no known IP, that you can’t really describe in terms of other games. Then they go and give it a name like Under the Skin. Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of other things named Under The Skin. It’s not very original.
I like the Japanese name a lot more. Over there it was known as “Meiwaku Seijin: Panikku Meika”, which roughly translates to “Annoying Alien: Panic Maker”. You could use any half of that title for the English release and it would have sounded better. Panic Maker is a much better name; I’d even take Annoying Alien. This era of media loved their references to old B-movies, so why not name it something like “Prank 9 From Outer Space”? The name Under The Skin could have used a few more workshops.
Conclusion
That’s Under The Skin, a dubiously named party game that no one played. It’s very straightforward, but fun. It has some neat ideas I haven’t seen replicated anywhere else, but some weird design choices with how the UFOs work and how passive the enemy AI is holds the game back from being more enjoyable. If these two things were fixed, you could get a better sense of what the game is trying to be. Still, it’s a fun party game, even if you can’t find someone to play it with.
I recommend Under The Skin. If you can get a copy of it somehow. This game didn’t sell well, and Capcom doesn’t care about it, so don’t expect to see it re-released anywhere. It’s stuck on the PS2 forever. There hasn’t even been any references to this game in other Capcom works, which is odd, since they like to reference any obscure bit of lore they can find.
There is a specific group of people I’d recommend this to: Indie developers looking for ideas. This game has a great base to build on, and there aren’t any other games like it.
It’s no secret that indie games take heavy inspiration from other games. Back in the day it was Zelda, then Earthbound was the hot item, and now we have spiraled inwards and we have indie games inspired by indie games that came out months prior. Stardew Valley-likes, Balatro-likes, games inspired by Hollow Knight.
This is all fine and dandy. I get trying to imitate something you like, but when it comes to making a game, how about getting inspiration from something that could have worked? You want your game to be good, so you base it off something you like that’s also good. Everyone knows Zelda is good, so if you take elements from that, your game’s going to be good, too, right? That’s the thing. Everyone’s played Zelda. Everyone knows it’s good. If someone plays your game they go “ah, it’s inspired by Pokemon, right?” or any other popular game. We’ve already played those.
There are three sources for games, in order of difficulty: New idea, remaking a failed idea, remaking a good idea. The first one’s the hardest. You have to make something yourself, from scratch. Of course you’re going to have bits and elements from other games. Nothing is created in a vacuum; you’re inspired by things, but it’s a relatively original idea and concept with fresh mechanics. The third one is the one I’ve been talking about all this time. The copy. “It’s Stardew Valley meets Balatro!”, that sort of thing. It’s easy.
The middle ground between those two, remaking something that didn’t work, is a great jumping off point. You already have the basic concept, all you need to do is tweak it a little with your own ideas and fixes, and you have something that works. No one remembers Under The Skin, no one played it, but they would like it if they did.
The first obvious thing to do is add four-player support. Add some trendy proximity voice chat, some new gadgets, rebalance the old ones and add some new-school polish here and there and you have a fun, new game. I can’t guarantee it will sell a ton, but I can guarantee that you’d get at least four sales from me.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go throw bowling balls at my neighbors. If they drop coins, I’ll know they’re not aliens. Until next week!
If you want to read about another old, irrelevant Capcom game that had some neat ideas, check out my review of The Beatdown: Fists of Vengeance
Or check out the review for Katamari Damacy if you still want more colorful PS2 games.
Peak 2000s prank energy here. Capcom are sleeping on a giant.