Sky the Scrapper is a game about the untethered funk of early adulthood, punctuated by pulsing 2D high-score races to clean the sides of buildings. Succeed and youâll collect just enough cash to keep your miserly solo life in a messy one-room apartment afloat. Fail and youâll be forced to move back in with your parents. Itâs an earnest mashup of twitchy arcade action and chill life sim thatâs stayed with me long after Iâve stopped playing.
Released on Steam by developer Ryo Kobuchi over the summer, Sky the Scrapper is divided into two parts. The first is a visual novel in which you navigate a weekly schedule from a menu screen that looks like its nestled inside an early 2000s ad for the PS2. You get text messages from your parents guilt-tripping you and updates from your boss at the window-washing company about whether youâre meeting expectations at work. If itâs your day off you can do stuff like take a nap, visit the museum, or go out to the club, each of which costs a certain amount of money and impacts your mood for the better or worse, which in turn affects your stamina recovery rate on the job. This is the Persona-like part of the game.
When itâs not your day off, you spend your time mopping bird poop, graffiti, and other muck off the walks of urban highrises. You hang from a rope that acts like a 2D pendulum, letting you swing from one side of the building to the other. Hold down one button and youâll be able to spend stamina to climb up the wall. Hold it down too long and youâll lose your grip and plummet to the ground, leaving you with only partial pay and injuring yourself ahead of the next dayâs work.
A timer drives the action, and you only have a minute to clean up as much of each building as possible. Fail to wring out your tools at various times throughout the job and youâll clean less effectively. Thereâs even an ultimate meter you can build to unleash a super-cleaning attack that lets you effortlessly wall-run without spending stamina. Itâs an unusual amalgamation of arcade-y mechanics unlike anything else Iâve come across. After successfully completing certain jobs you earn points to unlock ability nodes along a sprawling network of skills, perks, and other buffs. You can also buy equipment to help you see at night or increase your stamina.
Thereâs a lot of RNG in Sky the Scrapper and the difficulty ramps up surprisingly fast. Your changing work schedule dictates some of the hazards youâll face, from barely lit night shifts to bad weather and birds darting at you. You might feel like youâre doing an okay job, only to realize youâre not scaling up your character fast enough to contend with the growing challenge, or you may find your ambitions clipped short by simple bad luck. Thereâs a poignancy to these moments as the mundanity of the rest of your daily city life builds up around them, but it can also feel a bit overly punishing.
None of these systems or mechanics is as individually satisfying or polished as Iâd like, but combine it altogether and Sky the Scrapper offers a surprisingly unique and effective package. It feels like it establishes the template for a really neat, more fleshed-out sequel. Even so, Iâm glad I stumbled upon Sky the Scrapper and still occasionally feel the call to go back and try to complete each of the different story scenarios and endings.
