videogameblog

Death Stranding is about delivering. There’s something kind of addicting about it; (something that’s actually mentioned in-game – the enemies that try to rob you of your stuff have ‘Delivery Dependance Syndrome’, they’re addicted to delivering cargo.) The gameplay loop is simple enough to be mindless but customizable enough to stay fresh. As you progress through the game’s array of different terrains, you’re provided with a variety of items to assist your deliveries. Items can range from a gun you can load with your own blood to a floating carrier you can load up with packages or use as a makeshift sledge. You’re encouraged to mix and match different pieces of tech based on the job. Rough terrain? You’ll need a couple of ladders, maybe some climbing rope. MULEs (the in-game enemies) in the way? Bringing a weapon is probably a good idea. However, you’ll have to carry everything you bring with you on your back; there’s no hammerspace in Death Stranding. Ideally, you’d want to pack light, but most deliveries require you to load up on cargo alongside your tools. Carrying too much slows you down and puts you at risk of losing your balance and potentially damaging your stuff, so you’ll need to carefully consider what you need and what you don’t. I think the player-oriented attitude that everything is treated with in Death Stranding is what allows it to remain so engaging despite its seemingly dull ‘walking simulator’ concept. You’re constantly encouraged to pick up one more lost package, take on one more order – increasing the risk each time. The difficulty of your journey is up to you, it’s based on the risks you take and the preparation you make beforehand. A river is no big deal if you brought a ladder with you, but it’s a potential 10-minute detour if you didn’t. Overtime I found myself putting together a set of essentials; tools I would always bring with me. My friend was playing alongside me, and we would always run with completely different items. A sticky gun and 4 PCCs was my go-to, but my friend would never use the sticky gun. My final combination of items was a level 3 stabilizer (which negates fall damage entirely) and a speed skeleton, which pretty much allows you to fly. Combining the boosted jump of the speed skeleton with the gliding of the stabilizer gives you insane in-air time. There are countless combinations of tools like this; Death Stranding’s gameplay is insanely volatile. However, one structure makes gameplay really boring and is pretty much necessary if you want to get points for fast deliveries (which you need to 100% the game). It’s the zipline. It’s a structure that allows you to move freely between as many points as you want, pretty much letting you fly from one facility to another. When you first unlock it, it seems great! You can quickly get wherever you need without all that annoying walking. You quickly realize something pretty damning about it though; ziplining is boring as fuck. I wish that there was some drawback to them, like they have 5 uses or something because they really de-gamify the gameplay. Despite this, I think that a sandbox game like this is perfect for Kojima. The multiple purposes assigned to each tool reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 2; you could use items like the coolant gun to freeze bombs, wake up enemies, clear bugs and blind guards. Kojima’s meticulous overthinking and inclusion of every logical function flourish in a sandbox environment. Eventually, Death Stranding’s landscapes become less daunting as you become familiar with the routes you need to take. You’ll remember there’s a spot around to the left of this cliff that’s easier to climb, or a jump ramp you placed a couple orders ago will come in handy again. As you familiarize yourself with what you’re able to climb and what kind of terrain you can run on, you’ll start to stroll through environments that used to be daunting with ease. You’ll also start figuring out things that the game initially frames as hinderances are recontextualized in certain situations; if you’re going somewhere with virtually no cargo at all, rolling down a hill or getting washed down a river can be good strategies for getting to your destination quicker. You can traverse the same area countless times and have a different experience each time based on what you’re carrying. You develop a similar sense of familiarity in regards to the enemies but it’s more of a negative when it comes to gameplay. BTs (Beached Things) are mysterious ghosts that float around in the rain. At first, encountering them is pretty scary. The tension is high since you can’t really see them unless you stand still, so you must rely on a scanner on your shoulder which points in the direction of the closest one. After a while, you unlock a gun which allows you to shoot your blood at the BTs, dispatching them at the expense of some health. This would be an interesting risk-reward system if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re also able to load yourself up with blood bags, which give you 500 health each. Doing this eliminates the risks that shooting the gun poses, allowing you to run around killing every BT with no risk. As expected, this makes them a lot less scary. When you’re 30 hours deep, you’ll feel nothing but annoyance every time your BT scanner starts going off. It’s insult to injury that it’s pretty much impossible to drive vehicles through BT areas on higher difficulties without them dragging you out. There is an attempt to mix things up in the late game by adding BTs that cannot be killed, but by this point you’re already sick of them and probably just want to get your delivery done. I hope in the sequel they reduce the tedium of these encounters. When it comes to MULEs, they’re much more fun to fight than BTs. Their camps are always outlined on the map so it’s hard for them to catch you off guard like BTs. There’s a wide variety of ways you can approach dispatching them - you can roll through with an armored truck and run them over, sneak around and knock them all out, go in guns blazing with an arsenal of pistols and machine guns or tie them all up with a gun that shoots ropes. I usually enjoyed fighting MULEs. They eventually start using guns later on and get a lot harder to fight, which limits your options of disposal quite a bit. It gets significantly harder to clear a camp using anything but an assault rifle, so gameplay gets a little harder and a little less sandbox-y. When fighting MULEs, your weapons are all non-lethal, the guns shoot rubber pellets. This is because death in Death Stranding is a big deal – if someone dies, the Necrosis process begins. They have 48 hours before a voidout (huge explosion) occurs. Countless games have tried to address the Ludonarrative Dissonance (sorry) surrounding killing in video games; Lara Croft, The Last of Us, Spec Ops: The Line. Most of these attempts ultimately end up conforming to the systems they’re condemning (Specs Ops has multiplayer) and the message never really comes off right. Death Stranding is my favorite example of killing feeling like it has palpable consequences. If you kill someone accidentally, it’s a big deal. You’ll need to drop what you’re doing and carry the body to the nearest incinerator to dispose of it. It isn’t forced upon the player; you could play the entire game without killing anyone, so when it does happen it feels much more significant. Your actions feel like they have consequences, death is a significant event.

Death Stranding is about connecting. You play as Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who’s been tasked with the job of travelling across North America to connect everyone to the newly established ‘Chiral Network’, which pretty much works like a super-fast internet. In Death Stranding, the United States have been abolished, fragmenting the population into isolated communities. The chiral network allows people to communicate, even face-to-face via hologram, connecting everyone once more. Alongside connecting everyone to the chiral, Sam is also tasked with convincing them to join the newly-established United Cities of America (UCA), which some people aren’t too keen on. You can eventually convince everyone you come across to join, even if they show resistance. Their change in attitude always seems abrupt, some people go from cursing out the UCA to calmly joining, supposedly because Sam delivered them some stuff? I found this to be pretty silly. Most of the characters you encounter on your travels (other than the story-relevant ones) are painfully shallow and forgettable, the only memorable ones being celebrities like Sam Lake or Geoff Keighley. Most of their characterization comes through the emails they’ll send you overtime, but literally every single one of them types with the same generic attitude. One guy, The First Prepper, is extremely reluctant to join the UCA and acts pretty tech-illiterate and isolated. But then when he starts emailing you, he’s like “Say, why don’t you come join me for a spot of al fresco dining some time? You’ll love it, I promise!”. They all type like this, it’s a shame they didn’t try to put more characterization into the way they type since it’s pretty much the only way you ever communicate or learn anything about them. Despite this it’s still satisfying to go through the checklist of preppers and get each of them to join the UCA, getting all the facilities to join is definitely the best way to play. Each time you max out a new facility you get a ‘star’ which you stick on your suit like a patch, when you get all of them, they’re arranged like the stars on the American Flag. It’s like you’re reconstructing the states, since each star represents a state on the American Flag. The narrative of the game is centered thematically around connection, and its present in so many facets of the game its fun to try and spot them all. The theme of connection comes through in the gameplay too, with this being the first ‘strand type’ (…) game. Using other players structures and giving them likes really feels like you’re part of a system of porters. Donating stuff to help others always feels like you’re actually contributing to making other players’ journeys easier. It also makes connecting to the Chiral Network impact your gameplay experience, as player made structures will spawn in once you’ve connected that area to the map. As you’ve probably noticed, the systems of Death Stranding are deeply encoded within fictional concepts that span a wide range of topics. All of these concepts click together pretty nicely to create a unique feeling sci-fi world. It separates itself from its contemporaries through it’s unique take on the future; the world feels more primal than it does futuristic at first. As you play, the landscapes eventually become dotted with ziplines, highways and bunkers. It’s up to you to push the world into the future.

Some other stuff I wanted to mention quickly before I finish writing:

- I found the narrative of the game to be engaging, although confusing at times. Kojima has stopped overexplaining stuff as much as he used to during cutscenes, instead putting all the technological explanations of how each piece of tech functions in an optional database. I think the pacing benefits massively from this, and the narrative doesn’t feel like it’s being ground to a halt every 5 minutes like some of his other games do. However, all this information is in a side database but all the characters talk as if you’ve read and remembered each piece of information in there. There was quite a few times where I would just forget what a Q-pid was or what a stillmother was; I love how many cool concepts are at play here but it does get a little exhausting to try and track each facet of how this world functions.

- Almost all of the characters present within the main narrative are extremely memorable and unique, my favorites were Fragile and Deadman. There were some weaker ones though, like Higgs. I found Troy Baker’s performance to be a little overdone and he reminded me of Jared Leto’s Joker most of the time (he even has the makeup on in the sequel). Kojima’s classic naming scheme is in full swing here, one guy is called ‘Die Hardman’ while the women are called ‘Fragile’ and ‘Mama’ (He really needs to stop doing that).

- The cutscenes present throughout are all excellently shot, sometimes I forget Kojima is actually a good director. I really like the one where you reunite with Amelie and the one where you first meet Heartman.

- I found the narrative to get a little bogged down by the presence of so many moving parts - there’s Higgs’ plot, the journey to save Amelie, the mystery of Cliff, can Die Hardman be trusted? Alongside all the other concepts it can get a little confusing at times.

- probably my favorite open world of all time? Where other AAA games use an open world as nothing but shallow filler to bridge the gaps between different missions, the gameplay of Death Stranding is inversed; the missions ARE the traversal between two points.

I think fundamentally, the reason Death Stranding works so effectively despite its concept seeming pretty boring is its refusal to cut corners like other games do; you can’t carry an RPG in your pocket like Michael De Santa, you can’t run around and kill 1000 people without consequence like Nathan Drake, you can’t sprint across rough terrain without the risk of tripping over a rock. It’s an extremely grounded experience, one that refuses to do anything without meticulously considering each function and consequence.