Skin Deep review

Make space for this

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

• Developer: Blendo Games
• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
• Release: April 30th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: TBC
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

“I. WANT. NINA. PASADENA. DEAD!” This is a distressing thing to hear from the mouth of a space pirate boss, much less see punching onto the screen in bold red text with every word. That’s you, see - Nina Pasadena, deep freeze insurance commando. You eavesdrop on the angry rant early in this tightly packed immersive sim. You’ll discover why the masked marauder hates you so much, but only after you spend a lot of levels crawling through vents, throwing pepper at guards, flushing their heads down toilets, and pulling glass shards from your bare feet. Skin Deep is a sci-fi caper of sudden and plentiful surprise, and it is dense with gags that land with the happy sting of a slap to the brain.

Some elevator pitches for Skin Deep:

• Die Hard in space but the hostages are cats.
• Heat Signature but it’s a first-person shooter made in the same engine as Doom 3.
• Deus Ex but actually you did ask for this.

Each level sees Nina defrost aboard a ship that has been boarded by a pirate gang called the Numb Bunch. The crew - all cuboid cats with character - have been trapped in little purple boxes throughout the ship. It’s up to you to find the keys needed to free them and call in an escape pod. After that, you’ll have to deal with a pirate reinforcement brigade - either kill them all or find the one who holds the key to their getaway shuttle, take that key, and scarper.

The cats will give you hints about where to find their keys if you ask them while they’re trapped. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

It’s the same goal every mission, so variety comes in how you go about de-pirating your vessel. Your freezer pod can hold no tools or weapons, so you’ve gotta go looking for any object that can be used as an improvised weapon. The bluntest example, in all senses of that word, is a conduit pipe ripped off the wall and used to club a guard upside the noggin. It’s not pretty, and it’s only vaguely effective (items have a “durability” count and will snap after a few bashes).

Walking on glass will bleed you out if you don’t pause to remove it. Likewise you can get impaled or pierced with a bullet - all need to be healed. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

But there are other standard fighting procedures. Throwing a box of pepper or a rugwort plant at baddies will leave them dazed for a few seconds - long enough to pounce on their back and ride them like a terrible donkey into the nearest hand dryer or computer screen. Or you could lure your prey towards an airlock with a radio tuned to a jazz channel, then twist the safety valves and cause a room-wide depressurisation that slurps them into space. These are go-to tricks you learn fairly early, but later murders will include the use of ticking TNT, homing grenades, and other sillier weapons, all procured by scrounging around in lockers and following notes to hidden stashes.

Every item has a description label explaining how to use it, and to read the label you tap the shift key to zoom in comically and uncomfortably close. Nina is an excellent comedy action hero. She is basically walking around a spacecraft in her bare feet, picking up and squinting at bananas, cigarette lighters, soap, aerosol cans, TNT, and mumbling the written directions to herself. There’s also a rare “duper” that can duplicate any of these objects. Leading to the simple solution of finding one cat key and duplicating it multiple times - at least until the duper runs out of juice. Or you could also, I don’t know, duplicate another duper.

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But my favourite tool is the walkie talkie. Get spotted in another stealth game and you’ll often have to hide and wait out a countdown until everyone goes back to their posts, muttering about rats. Here, the alert keeps going until Nina puts on a gruff voice, opens a comms channel, and calls in the all-clear herself. Sometimes pirates will have a roll call over their radios, and if you’ve silently dispatched guards, this means trouble. An MIA pirate who doesn’t respond will mean an alert goes up, releasing shipboard turrets and making pirates double cagey.

The solution? Use a walkie talkie to pretend to be each pirate you have killed. I once faked three “nothing to reports” but my walkie-talkie ran out of battery before I could report the fourth and final missing guard. I had to hoof it double-quick to the bridge to use the main comms microphone to pretend to be the last guy. “Everything’s, uh, normal here!” growls Nina in the most unconvincing tone.

The walkie talkie is a must-have. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

There are also a few guns - a semi-automatic rifle, a pump-action shotgun, and a headshotty pistol. But they jam often and come with little ammo. The pistol is the most handy, being a one-hit-kill insta-headshotter. But it only comes with one round in the chamber. After that, it’s only good for throwing at your enemy’s head in a blind panic.

They feel designed as intentional last-resorts, an act of desperation when facing down the tougher armoured foes. These are tankier goons who can’t be pounced upon and aren’t bothered by the vacuum of space. Dealing with them is often a case of improvised explosives. The cat rescue pod will also load you up on the heavier ordinance in preparation for those bigger boys. Tripwire grenades and TNT are the tools here.

Nice rifle. But is it as reliable as a banana? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

Aside from all that, almost every level offers some singular toy or gimmick to make use of. A fast food ship has you generating burgers and burritos from a food machine to then pass through a hatch for random payments from drive-thru customers (this is the kind of universe in which consumers can pay for meatloaf with a loaded pistol). A library ship has book-detecting gates to prevent theft, and they’ll shock you if you pass through holding a copy of “Firmware for Felines” or “My Haunted Abs”. But those gates will also zap enemy guards if you lob a book through just as they step over the threshold.

There are mining lasers to misuse, mechs to hijack, horrible little “swordfish” drones that will impale you if you’re not careful (but can be used against your foes with a hacking grenade). One ship contains a vault that requires two buttons to be pressed at the same time. The solution is fairly simple - or it would be, if there were not a guard circling the vault every few seconds. I thought I had things under control when I timed my steps and infiltrated this vault. Until the skull of another enemy I had tucked in my pockets started shouting muffled cries for help.

Yes. You have to carry around the decapitated heads of your enemies until you can find some way to flush them safely into space. If you don’t, they’ll slowly glide back to a regenerating station and get a new body. This puts all sorts of weird pressure on you as an evildoer dispatcher. Each skull takes up one of your precious five item spots, aside from being a mouthy liability. So you have to be on the lookout for airlocks or trash chutes to flush them out. Failing that, you can always smash a window.

Giddy up. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

That’s if they’re not locked up. A big chunk of time is spent looking for the codes to unlock the vents, airlocks, and windows. These codes are scribbled on sticky notes hidden around the place, or sometimes on pirate PDAs. It’s a way to force Nina into certain corridors or to limit her options early in the level. The secret buttons or requirements to unlock many setpiece gimmicks are also usually discovered by reading logs and notes. I didn’t mind this, but I can see it being one thing that might annoy those who hate to read even a single sentence in video games.

At least it’s just a bit of reading. Blendo Games had Graham frowning in his Quadrilateral Cowboy review (their last game) because he felt the systems and toys handed to you weren’t given sufficient space or time to fully blossom. You don’t get the sense of a sandbox in those small, hacky levels, and the game was over fairly quickly. Here that feels like less of a problem. The levels are still small and confined (and the game is not particularly lengthy) but your assortment of gadgets becomes increasingly varied, and it feels more like a playground than Quad Cow.

Each enemy death is accompanied by a stylish freeze frame showing the exact thing that killed them. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

Of course, even the most raucous jungle gym can only last so long. The quickest route to thinning pirate numbers is the least interesting (make them slip on a banana and bash their head on a sink). So if you do that a lot, it gets old fast. I felt compelled to go looking for more colourful opportunities. Slurping guys out a decompressing airlock or smashing a window remains as satisfying here as it is in Heat Signature or FTL. Especially when the camera freezes and a black-lined vignette effect frames the pirate (“Randy”) as he sadly tumbles out into the void. But you may get far less out of repeating this manoeuvre than I do.

There are also quite a few bugs. One saw me warping into the floor of the ship and becoming trapped in the void between walls. I once suffered a rough crash when saving at a terminal. And there’s plenty of glitchy enemy behaviour - getting stuck on the spot, becoming embedded in walls, patrolling in tight, pointless circles. But I will forgive any amount of bugs if a game makes me laugh. And Skin Deep does that a lot.

I am using this screenshot to illustrate that there are jokes even though this is not the best joke aha you see the best jokes will only work if you don’t see them coming so please do not ask me any more about the jokes I don’t want to talk about it. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

Doors open to reveal unexpected chuckles. Item labels are written with the succinct humour of a marketing copywriter who wants to be fired. I didn’t think I could love a Blendo cat more than the silent arms dealer who sells you all manner of gadgets in Quadrilateral Cowboy , but there’s a high-and-mighty mobster feline in this game called Little Lion who I would pledge allegience to in a jot. You are introduced to him in a 5-minute sequence that contains more laughs than the entirety of other comedy games.

Even outside of those giggling japes, there are endless smile-raisers. The inventive playfulness of Blendo is on full display. There’s a James Bond styled opening song that you walk through as the credits roll. Exposition chats are accompanied by an old-fashioned projector that lights up the room with figures and diagrams. Finish a level and the game will sing “Niii-naaaaaaa!” in celebration. It’s got so many little flourishes like this. Granted, I’m predisposed to love a Blendo Game, after the smash cuts of early free games like Thirty Flights Of Loving, and the hacker heisting of Cowboy. But if you haven’t played anything from this studio before, Nina Pasadena’s sci-fi jokeathon is certainly the place to start.

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Skin Deep

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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