Death Stranding Simulates Frustration Too Well

 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.

Dodging BTs in Death Stranding

 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.

Making Sense of Death Stranding

Perhaps the most enigmatic upcoming game in the industry is Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding. Kojima famously broke off with Konami, the company that had produced his decades-spanning Metal Gear series (starting in the 80s and going up to the recent Metal Gear Solid V) in what looks like a pretty ugly divorce.

Kojima has created his own production studio, and the company's first game will be Death Stranding.

Hideo Kojima has always had a very cinematic style when it comes to game-making. In fact, his Metal Gear Solid games tend to have very long and complicated cutscenes (I think there's a 45-minute one in MGS.)

Kojima is one of the clear examples of an auteur game director - there are certainly other hugely important game creators from his generation (Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Zelda, and a lot of other famous games, is the Walt Disney of video games.) He has always attempted to deal with big, important themes in the medium - usually without a lot in the way of subtlety - and I think has been one of the major forces in exploring games as a serious art form.

So I'm extremely curious about Death Stranding.

Right now, we know nothing whatsoever about gameplay. I don't even really want to speculate on what it might be.

What we do have is a cast and a bit about a setting. There have been two trailers, each with CGI game-versions of characters who are played by famous actors (well, two actors and one director.)

In the first trailer, we see what appears to be a beach covered in dead marine life (Death Stranding is, I believe, a phenomenon documented in marine biology) and there seems to be black oil just about everywhere.

On this beach, we see a naked Norman Reedus (Reedus was going to be in Kojima's Silent Hills, a project that Konami cancelled, which I think precipitated their break.) Reedus' character has some sort of strange umbilical cord that extends to an infant lying near him. He also has a cross-shaped scar on his abdomen. Reedus picks up the infant and holds him, and we actually see a number of light handprints on his shoulders. Suddenly, the infant disappears, and Reedus looks around, horrified, until he sees five human-like figures approaching in the air toward him.

The second trailer I'd say has more content to it, but is still a bizarre mystery.

We see a muddy riverbed that, similarly, has dead marine life all over it (particularly crabs.) However, rather than on an isolated beach, we actually see that we're in a large city that seems to be a war zone.

Walking through this area is Guillermo del Toro, who is holding some strange mechanical capsule. He wears a suit and has a pin saying "Bridges" and "United Cities of America," which almost seems to suggest he's a member of this organization - the symbol on the pin is the 48 contiguous states with a kind of spiderweb radiating out from where Washington is. He also seems to have a scar running in a line along his forehead.

Del Toro shuffles his way under a bridge, but he backs up to see that there are warplanes flying overhead, each with things streaming off the back of them. There is also a rainbow overhead, but it's strangely inverted - the curve seems to be pointing downward rather than up.

Del Toro watches as a tank covered in very organic-looking objects makes its way across the bridge followed by creepy skeletal soldiers.

Del Toro then attaches some kind of umbilical cord - it's not clear if it's attached to him or some piece of technology he's got - to the capsule, and an infant appears inside. The infant then winks at us.

The water rises, and we see a doll drift under the bridge and into some kind of sewer. It briefly glows red, and then the camera moves past it to reveal five soldiers - four are skeletons wearing WWII-era gear while the middle one wears modern combat gear. The middle one gives commands to the skeletons, and they march forward, electrical umbilical cords breaking off and returning to a pack the commander is wearing on his belt.

The commander lifts his night-vision goggles and his helmet completely disappears, revealing him to be Mads Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen looks just as creepy as he did playing Hannibal Lecter in the recent tv show (which holy crap, go see it - just don't eat anything while you're watching.) He sees the little doll drift forward and pump into his foot, and then he smiles.

So...

What the hell is going on here?

In terms of plot, I'd guess that we've got a world consumed by war. We're probably in America given Del Toro's pin, but the "United Cities" rather than States suggests that perhaps the countryside has become too dangerous for civilization to persist. In fact, the label saying "Bridges" almost suggests that they might need alternate means of getting form one city to another, perhaps even teleportation, like how the infant appears within his capsule.

The image of dead animals and oil everywhere really seems to imply that there has been some kind of environmental catastrophe brought on by rampant industrial activity. The skeletal soldiers and grossly biological weapons of war are kind of like the nightmarish extreme of the military industrial complex. Indeed, Mikkelsen is directing soldiers that sure look like they're already dead - the biological has been transformed into tools for the powerful and malicious.

Mikkelsen is presumably looking for Del Toro, or at least the capsule that he is carrying.

There's definitely a motif here of umbilical cords, but the three (living) characters we see are all men. In fact, Reedus' character has that scar on his abdomen that almost looks like a more extreme version of a C-section scar (though that's typically just one horizontal incision.) In Reedus' case, it's clearly organic or at least implanted into his body to have this connection. Del Toro's is more ambigous, while Mikkelsen's umbilicus is purely technological, and rather than connecting with infants, it's connected to the opposite - corpses.

Anyway, I'm super curious, but I think we're going to have to wait a while to find out what this game is actually going to be like.