So, I've had Death Stranding for about a week. I've made my way across the ruined, rain-soaked wasteland that is the eastern remnants of the United States (shrunken considerably down to make it fit as a game world where you're mostly crossing it by foot) and delivered packages to various islands of human civilization while tossing grenades made of my own blood at bizarre and alien marine life that rises out of a black water that appears out of nowhere.
The world of Death Stranding is intriguing - a world made into a ruin when the barrier between the realms of the living and the dead is broken, where civilization has been devastated, and where a single person's death could mean a catastrophic "void out" that can wipe out a massive chunk of the planet. People have been forced to isolate, and take extra care to ensure that if someone dies, their body is incinerated before it can cause one of these events.
There are intriguing figures, often played by recognizable actors (most centrally, the player character of Sam Porter Bridges, once Sam Strand, the son of the last American President, played by and modeled after Norman Reedus) and a strange, bizarre world that has a post-apocalyptic sci-fi feel while also being couched in Egyptian mythology. I'm particularly curious to learn more about the character played by Mads Mikkelsen, whom I know becomes an antagonistic presence later in the game (and appeared particularly sinister in one of the early teasers for it) but here seems to be the father of BB - the piece of organic human technology that Sam carries around and seems to be forming a bond with, despite his handlers' advice that he think of the BT-detecting fetus as a piece of equipment rather than a person.
But I hit a point today where I decided that I might not play it anymore.
Gameplay in Death Stranding is primarily concerned with traversing the hostile world. There are enemies to face - the creepy BTs (some of which seem to be ghostly human forms, while others are these kind of squid-whales) but also humans known as MULEs, who have gone mad and become addicted to carrying cargo around (one wonders if these are meant to be a commentary on the compulsion to perform tasks in games).
As Sam, you pile stacks upon stacks of cargo containers on your carrying harness, and the very act of walking around becomes one of the challenges - pretty easily, you'll be teetering from the weight of your inventory, and so merely walking in a straight line can be an act of balance and carefully controlling your speed.
Plotting your course across the world, then, becomes one of the challenges. There's that smooth area over there where you might even be able to drive your reverse motor-trike, but there are BTs that might assault you along the way, making you potentially prefer the rockier, cliff-strewn path that might require you to bring some ladders along (or hope that the ladders from others players' games will be there for you.)
But ultimately, your goal here is to get from point A to point B. And doing so allows you to deliver your cargo, and see about five million statistics calculated, and... rinse and repeat.
Now, there have been intriguing story elements - Troy Baker shows up as a villainous terrorist who summons a giant BT, presumably in an effort to cause a voidout that will destroy Port Knot City - a major location you're trekking to in the early game (or at least I assume it's still early).
But the real gameplay loop here is about the careful, lonely, kind of frustrating process of hauling random shit from one hard-to-reach location or another.
The breaking point for me, where I just had to shut the game off, was when I was trying to skirt around an area filled with BTs and drove my trike across what I thought was a shallow river - I thought I'd forded it on foot previously, so the vehicle, I hoped, would have to issues. However, it got too deep and the cargo I was carrying and that which was on the trike all fell off, floating down the river. Given that some of that cargo was for the "orders for Sam" missions that I believe (maybe) are sort of the core, important ones, I tried to chase them down, and a single container started to flow away from me before I could grab it. I chased that one down, only to fall in the river and have all my cargo start floating away.
And it was fucking frustrating. And I get that it's supposed to be - the world that this game depicts is one of frustrations and difficulties in doing the simplest tasks.
But I was sitting there, thinking about the fact that I'm on my couch, playing a game, hoping to get something meaningful out of all of this, or at least have some fun, and... I just wasn't.
I get plenty frustrated in my day-to-day life, and I think there are few emotions that I hate more. And games are challenging, and can be frustrating at time.
But when I play something like Elden Ring, and I die to Malenia for the thirteenth time in a row, and I get so frustrated that I feel like I need to stop playing for a little and cool down, I still come back to it, because the frustration feels worth it. I know, in that case, that when I do finally achieve victory (and I have, on I think five characters by now,) it will give me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
But in the first several hours of Death Standing, I haven't gotten that feeling of accomplishment.
When I turn in some order that someone has made, or return some piece of cargo lost out in the world, I'm blasted with a summary page of statistics and "likes" I'm getting for the manner in which I've accomplished my task, and it all blurs together, meaninglessly.
Now, sure, maybe this is a commentary on the fact that the hard work of keeping a society together isn't actually the epic, climactic feats that most games concern themselves with, but is instead the humble, day-to-day management of logistics and elbow grease. And that's something that, as a worldview, I can respect a great deal.
But I think that even the most sophisticated works of art (and I hope by this point in the medium's life we can agree that video games are an artistic medium) still need to do something that is compelling, to keep you engaged. With Death Stranding, I'm just not sure that this game is doing that for me.
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