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.
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.