'Session' is the 'Dark Souls' of skateboarding games
Yes I'm aware of the Dark Souls comparison cliché, but hear me out.
The first thing you need to know about the skateboarding game Session is that you can't ollie by pressing a button.
To do an ollie in Session, you first need to look at your feet, because the left analog stick controls your skater's left foot, and the right stick controls the right foot. If your skater is skating regular style (left foot forward), you need to pull the right stick back to set your right foot at the back end of the board and slide the left stick forward to pull the board up into the air with your left foot, mimicking the movements required to pull off an ollie in real life.
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It's not easy, and honestly, it's not immediately intuitive. But after skating around for a few minutes in a digital recreation of a few blocks of Manhattan, I started to get the hang of it and was soon landing ollies over and over.
I was sitting in a room in our offices in New York with developers Vincent Da Silva and Marc-André Houde who explained to me how the controls work. I had to rewire my brain after spending years using the analog sticks on the control to move characters.
And then I had to figure out how to do a trick.
After learning how to ollie, doing a heelflip and kickflip was easy enough. I just had to flick the sticks to the left or right and the skater would flip the board and land back on it, as long as I ollied high enough.
Now I wanted to do something a little bit more complicated: a grind. I lined up about 20 feet away from a staircase with a straight concrete ledge that continued on the left side as the stairs descended. I figured I'd skate at it, ollie up, 50-50 grind for a foot, and hop off.
I think I ollied at the ledge about 15 times times, messing it up every time. My angle was off and I wasn't moving my feet quick enough to angle the board correctly after getting some air. I fell over and over and over.
It reminded me of when I was a kid and I spent hours in the driveway trying to figure out how to do anything more than just skate in a straight line. I sweat a lot, I fell a lot.
With a little guidance from Houde, I finally managed to move the board right and do a nosegrind on the ledge. My speed was too low and I stopped mid-grind, hopped off, and technically kind of successfully did my first sequence.
I kept trying it again and again until I did something that actually looked decent. It felt great.
Nailing my simple sequence reminded me of something else: that feeling you get when you beat a difficult boss after trying and failing over and over. You know, like in action games like Dark Souls or the more recent Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice — games that require you to master their systems and controls in order to progress past their unrelenting enemies. Once you do master them, at least for the moment, that feeling of success is electric.
That feeling was my main takeaway from my hour-and-a-half in the room with Session. That and the passion I felt from developers Houde and Da Silva.
While the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series is an over-the-top, high-flying fantasy vision of skating, Session feels like a love letter to the reality of skating. It's not easy, not everyone can do it, and mastering it takes a lot of time and dedication.
And once you do land something cool, you can take the footage and cut it into a cool video to share with the world.
Session is available on Steam Early Access on Sept. 17 with other platforms to follow.
Topics Gaming
