Death Stranding — I Think I Finally Get It.
It’s taken some time to stick, but I think I finally understand the appeal of Death Stranding.
Death Stranding, Kojima’s first new IP since the Metal Gear franchise petered out. It was 2019’s surprise game, with the trailers leading up to release painting a desolate post-apocalyptic game starring Mads Mikkelsen, Troy Baker, and Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus (amongst a huge cast of equally talented actors and actresses). Prior to release, almost no-one had any idea what we were getting into. It looked like a literal walking simulator experience about reconnecting America, tied with a third person action/ stealth/ horror game, but with no real focus on any of those elements.
To say Death Stranding was received well wouldn’t be a false statement, despite what certain areas of the gaming fanbase claim. The original PS4 release hit an 82 on Metacritic, and the PC’s 2020 release hit a higher 86 — no doubt boosted by that platform’s access to better performance and visuals. The 2021 PS5 ‘Director’s Cut’? A nice even 85.
Obviously, that’s lower than the vast majority of PlayStation’s exclusive/ first party catalogue, but still a very high score in comparison to the hundreds (thousands) of games coming out every year. It’s also a score I’m fairly aligned with, despite my misgivings with Kojima’s haunted hiking experience.
See, for all its quirks (so many quirks) and all of its weirdness (so much weirdness) it’s a game that flies in the face of AAA gaming in general. This isn’t a Hollywood style shooter, or a huge RPG filled with narrative choices, or even a particularly action packed game like Uncharted or The Last of Us. It’s utterly unique, existing in a space all for itself, for better or for worse. Often both for better and for worse.
I’m on my fifth attempt to play Death Stranding to date, with the four before it halted by the exhaustion of Kojima’s impressive but exhausting cutscenes, the rigorous but mechanically impressive traversal, and thematically important but tedious encounters with ‘Beached Things’ — Death Stranding’s ominous dimensional beings stuck in limbo. For most games I wouldn’t have made it to five attempts, and that places Death Stranding in a weird spot.
On the one hand, it’s an enthralling experience that I’m desperate to finish. I’ve never played anything like it, or really seen anything like it across the general entertainment industry. Normally games are a step or two behind TV and movies, at least in terms of narrative and themes, but Death Stranding stands essentially alone in an ocean of AAA games that are, more often than not, derivative instead of innovative.
Part of that is of course the risk associated with not just a new IP, but a focus on gameplay systems that haven’t been explored like this in almost any other game. Sam (Norman Reedus) has an entire balance system, where the triggers are pulled to throw your balance across your back. Turn too sharp to the left with a heavy load in tow? You might have to pull the right trigger to keep from falling over. Each different surface is accompanied by different movement animations that sport tremendous detail, in what is arguably the most realistic presentation of the human frame that I’ve seen in video games.
If your stamina runs out while crossing a river, the current will wash you away until you hit something or land on solid ground. Your parcels are dashed across the environment, taking % damage for every fall you take, and Sam’s own shoes will slowly decay the more time is spent walking and climbing. The load you’re carrying can be rearranged across your back, hips, shoulders, and even hands, to try and optimise Sam’s movement speed and balance.
These are things that almost every other game just accepts as needless background information. “How would it ever be fun to fall over if you turn around too quickly?” Well I don’t know how, but it is. There’s a perceptible weight to Sam and the environment that almost doesn’t exist in other games, outside of similarly stellar examples like The Last of Us Part 2 or Red Dead Redemption 2. The act of simply walking up a hill becomes something to think about, as you imagine the burning calves as a result of a steep incline.
The asymmetrical multiplayer takes From Software’s idea of leaving helpful messages and funny emotes, and turns that into a whole mechanic. Many people play Death Stranding and just enjoy building up the infrastructure of a wasteland America. Stumble upon a river that’s annoying to cross? Maybe other players would find a bridge helpful. Find yourself avoiding BTs by climbing up a cliff, only to fall at the last hurdle? Perhaps a ladder or climbing rope would help someone out.
The most popular installations will get upvoted, thus raising the chance of appearing in other people’s worlds. I myself had a ladder upvoted dozens of times within hours of placing it, helpfully arranged to skirt an exit soaked in dead-but-not-actually ghosts. You can find and leave lost packages for other players to deliver, if you’re not going in that direction or simply want to shed some weight. You can ditch unwanted items, be that weapons, consumables, or aids, for other players to receive.
Death Stranding takes the idea of a video game community and deconstructs it down to the purest form. Ever heard the joke that taking a shopping cart back to its bay is the simplest form of nicety? Death Stranding is that concept, stretched over a beautiful and lonely open world that might take enraptured players 100+ hours to explore completely.
But for every act of mechanical or conceptual genius, and I do believe there’s genuine genius in Death Stranding, there’s examples of irritation, absurdity, and the kind of tedium that makes it hard to progress. Upon a successful delivery, you’re bombarded with what feels like dozens of report screens rating your success. The speed of delivery, the damage to packages, the route you took, etc. This information is also incredibly hard to parse thanks to a bewilderingly poor UI/UX experience (that is present in every area of the game, not just here) to the point that I was mashing skip to get back into the game every time.
I had to Google Death Stranding’s combat controls, as Sam’s capability in a combat situation isn’t well explained by the game at all. Kojima’s insistence on crediting actors as they appear in cutscenes is the opposite of immersive, instead erring on the side of obnoxious. The same thing applies to the excellent music, with artist names appearing on screen as they play. That last one is particularly sad, as the music punctuates stunning in-game moments and makes up one of the best game soundtracks I’ve heard.
Death Stranding’s story and lore is genuinely brilliant, so far as I can tell, with a shockingly good backstory that challenges the idea that Death Stranding is just the first game in an eventual franchise. But story injections are spread so far apart that there’s no real sense of the stakes. I’m supposed to be uniting a nation against a supernatural terrorist, but I’ve just spend three hours traipsing across the countryside?
Ludonarrative dissonance is a term that people roll their eyes at, but it absolutely applies in Death Stranding — especially if you’re the completionist sort, as you might spend dozens of hours delivering mundane packages instead of helping rescue the president’s daughter. Just as an example.
As it stands, I’m approximately a quarter of the way through Death Stranding, a game that has infuriated me as much as stunned me. This is the furthest I’ve got through it to date, and I’m fairly sure I’m going to see it through to the end this time. I am genuinely impressed that Kojima Productions managed, at the end of a console generation, to release a game with a suite of completely unique systems, characters, and a smart narrative that, combined, fly in the face of contemporary AAA game design. Not to mention one that visually still holds up four years later, sporting Guerilla’s Decima engine to craft environments that border on photorealistic at times.
I’m still not convinced by everything it offers. I genuinely think the game would be better without any combat at all, the stealth systems are half-baked at best, and the plethora of ugly menus really slows the game down to a crawl at times. But, in spite of all of this, Death Stranding is one of a handful of truly bold, unique experiences of this scale to land on modern consoles. One that, for the most part, succeeds in delivering a relaxing, memorable experience that doesn’t rely on huge set pieces to linger in the brain.
If you have a PlayStation, I think Death Stranding is one of most interesting game, at least in concept, that someone can try out these days. You might hate it, you might love it, but I’m pretty convinced you’ll at least remember it.
