I followed the announcement and slow release of information about the mind-trip of Death Stranding after it was first announced, the first major project for Hideo Kojima's own studio, after his messy break-up with longtime publisher Konami.
Having played the first three of the Metal Gear Solid games (the first on the Gamecube port "The Twin Snakes" and the latter two on the PS2) I was familiar with Kojima's madman auteur tendencies that, among other things, make his games feel almost more like strings of cutscenes with gameplay interludes rather than the other way around.
Searching for another weird game to dive into after exhausting more or less all there was of Control (and not finding the repeatable endgame content like the Jukebox excursions to be interesting enough to do much of them), I turned to this story.
The game released almost four years ago, but it's one I never really got around to (Control came out the same year). Given my obsession (and not really a recent one, though only now do I have a name to put to it) with the New Weird, I feel as if I'm finding it in all manner of artistic works. Death Stranding could potentially fit in that category, though you could argue it's either more just straight sci-fi or it's Kojima's typical anime-influenced fever dream - trading MGS' 80s action movie inspirations for something more like, honestly, The Postman.
The world of Death Stranding is bleak as all hell, and I think I'd be depressed by it if the nature of the monsters was not so compellingly odd and uncannily human. I haven't fully unpacked things, but the world has been devastated by the eponymous Death Stranding, which seems to have happened when the barrier between the world of the living and the dead was breached. Now, dead bodies that are not swiftly incinerated will "necrotyze" and bring about catastrophic "voidouts" that leave enormous, nuke-sized craters. This has forced the surviving remnants of humanity to live in isolation.
The jargon the game throws at you comes heavy and fast. Bridges is an organization that seeks to reunite America, primarily through Couriers who bring packages from one "Knot" (settlement) to the next. However, the infrastructure of the country is heavily eroded due to Timefalls - rainstorms where anything the water touches rapidly ages and expires. Indeed, one of the clever and subtle elements of the world design is that the territories one crosses (at least in my early stage of the game) all appear to be geologically aged - the hills are worn down with erosion and covered with boulders. I'm no geologist, but I believe the idea here is that the whole world looks like those places with old geological formations (for example, the Appalachian Mountains have a different look and feel from newer mountain ranges because they've stood so long).
In terms of gameplay, the challenge so far is to simply cross these expanses of open wilderness while balancing your load of cargo on a harness. Something most games give no more thought to than simply giving you a maximum carrying capacity, either by weight or by inventory slots, here becomes what I assume will be the primary management system of the game.
Three or four missions in (in an overall open-world structure) I have not yet gotten any kind of weapon, though the notice given when approaching one of the outposts where deliveries can be made indicates that outside of them, weapons can be used.
Aside from the rough terrain, it appears that there are a bandits you must evade (or presumably fight once you have some armaments) as well as "BTs," which are the supernatural creatures that seem tied to the apocalyptic transformation of the world.
The game lays on a huge number of systems in pretty rapid succession. I suspect the intent is for them to be overwhelming (I've gotten many "likes" from my deliveries, but I don't know if they have any real game impact or if they're essentially a way to keep score.) But I do get the sense that if I want to actually master the game, it will take a lot of patient experimentation.
It's an interesting choice, to make traversal the primary challenge of the game. Finding some dropped cargo bound for the starting town, I found myself wondering if there was a fast-travel system, or if that would defeat the entire point of the game.
Death Stranding also has some semi-online elements, which I believe are even less direct than FromSoft's Soulsborne games (given the popularity of Elden Ring, are we going to need to change that term?) You gain the ability to put ladders and ropes in certain places in the world, along with postbox stations that let you set cargo aside for other players to pick up and carry the rest of the way (or put in equipment you don't need that someone else might be able to use) but these things degrade and are eventually destroyed over time due to the Timefalls, keeping the world from being covered in convenient ladders and ropes and maintaining the challenge of traversal.
I have no idea if I actually like the game so far. It's slow, but simultaneously overwhelming.
Where do we draw the line between immersion and system bloat? This is a game where there's a "massage shoulders" button and a command to have the player character stop and take a piss (complete with draining bladder measured in milliliters, which then refills after a while).
See, I suspect that the complexity into which I've been thrown as a player is intentional - an artistic choice. But does it make for a good game? It's too early to say. My initial reaction is sort of offense - I think that the AAA game world has tended to load things down a little too much with superfluous systems of late (Control, for example, probably doesn't need a crafting system and could vastly simplify its loot system) but is Kojima and his team falling victim to that impulse, or taking it to its logical extremity as a way of commenting on it? (Given my history with his games, I suspect his comment would be "if only we could have thrown in more systems.")
The game's world is full of Kojima-isms, which go beyond the vast amount of jargon and include characters named "Die Hard-man" and "Dead Man" who aren't even clearly villains (I'm keeping my eyes on Die Hard-man, who always wears a skull-like high-tech mask while otherwise wearing a relatively normal business suit - Dead Man is just Guillermo del Toro with some kind of surgery scar that implies the top of his skull was opened up at some point). It's kind of interesting - the game goes to great lengths to credit the actors (and sometimes the separate voice actors - del Toro lends his likeness for Dead Man, but there's a different voice actor) and render them with great realism but throwing these bizarre character concepts that seem more at home in a comic book. Or a Mattel-sponsored cartoon from the 1980s.
What I'm trying to discover, as I think is the goal in examining a game, is where the core feeling of engagement with the game is. I never felt the need to replay any of the Metal Gear Solid games (actually, that might be a lie.) In those cases, I think playing through them was more about experiencing the story than really enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay. The early moments of Death Stranding include times when the camera pulls out as a somber indie-pop song plays, seeming to point to this kind of quiet movement across the land as the main "idea" behind the game. It remains to be seen how engaging I'll find that.
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