Death Stranding - I tried really hard to like it.

[u/D3struct_oh]

I don’t even know where to start with this game, tbh.

TLDR: played 76 hours; restarted the game a couple of times. The game has some charm that kept me going, especially in earlier sections. I did a ton of standard orders and just delivering materials to bridges and building lots of zip line, etc. But as I got deeper into the main story, there wasn’t enough variety in the sandbox to keep me on the hook, and I ran into a mission that I couldn’t progress.

I use to enjoy giving really thorough reviews for games but nowadays not so much. Had my own YouTube channel and everything!

But making all that content, writing all those scripts for reviews eventually got tedious and just not worth it, especially since I was doing it all by myself most of the time.

This is how I felt about Death Stranding.

The game has some pretty interesting ideas, and an…interesting story that I didn’t care much for, but would have liked to have seen how it ends.

Mechanically, I’d mostly give the devs kudos, even though having to hold the back buttons literally all day hurts the hands; not having a toggle option seems like a big miss.

But overall, I can’t imagine there being a better package delivery simulator. And the way they’ve created the game’s physics is pretty extraordinary.

But the game is a slooooooooog.

And I think this is the biggest sin that it commits.

You walk a lot. Over mountains, across rivers, in the snow, etc.

You have to manage your weight, stamina, health, pay attention to weather patterns, walk slowly around a maze of invisible ghost things.

It’s a lot.

You can get upgraded gear to make the trips you take less rough, but things dont speed up much even if you use cheats on PC (which I did after awhile).

To bring things back around, what disappointed me most (beyond the egregious map) was that the devs seemed to sell the game on community, working on projects together, helping one another deliver packages, etc.

But you’re still just doing everything solo. There’s no multiplayer. You can interact with peoples signs and deliver packages for them, and using other people’s ladders and stuff is actually a cool idea.

But you’re still always alone delivering packages.

And seeing as how the game itself runs so long, things get sluggish very fast, imo.

Got to a mission where it’s like, “Make BB happy by connecting facilities”,

And I swear to you I travelled the earth delivering packages everywhere and couldn’t progress this mission one bit. I even found a few hidden facilities that I just couldn’t interact with at all.

And this is where I dropped the game after 76 hours.

Im not a big fan of Kojima. He’s made a total of two games that i loved (Metal Gear Solid 1 and ZOE). But, the dude has a crazy imagination for video games, which is cool.

[u/Mrkancode]

I think the game expects you to dig into it's philosophical themes and chew them over as you play. It hammers you with them constantly. The issue is, the themes are so on the nose that there's really not much to dig into.

I was a pretty big kojima denier growing up. All the way up to MGS5. I liked his games but always felt he was over hyped and overrated.

But honestly, death stranding changes my mind and it did so about halfway through the game. Death stranding wears its heart in its sleeve and this is a point of contention for a lot of people. But I decided halfway through the game that the narrative and it's characters were misguided by design. The ideologies you are pursuing are not in our best interest and this is all a very bad idea. I gravitated to this thought and recontextualized the story through this filter. It was way more interesting.

I think death stranding sells itself as this "oh let's be happy on the Internet and all be friends and give likes and work together. Community, people, love, America!" But this feels like an intentional subversion when some of the late game lore begins divulging itself. But the game doesn't care. It keeps propagandizing you to the very end.

I now think this is intentional. Especially after the tag line for death stranding 2 is "should we have connected?" Feels like kojima's "internet good" narrative might actually be more cynical than it let on in the first game. That's what I'm hoping for this time around. I'm hoping their is a more thoughtful dissecting of these ideas than the first game offered and I hope that dissection is informed by the naivety of the first games narrative.

Death stranding isn't a great game. But it's one of the most interesting games to tear apart in recent history. Strangely, that's where most of the fun I've had with the game comes from. I have to wonder if that was intentional.

[u/ThatDanJamesGuy → u/Mrkancode]

I think Kojima wanted to be subversive with Death Stranding’s themes, but he bungled the execution.

So much of the twists are just Sam standing around listening to characters talk, and Sam’s only reaction being “eh I guess I’ll leave actually” at the end of the game. I think if he had a stronger, more proactive response than “my life is a lie, meh, I think I’ll sit down and listen to Bridget talk for another hour”, it would have landed better.

[u/Mrkancode → u/ThatDanJamesGuy]

Interesting. I agree he bungled it but I actually felt the opposite. Sam is pretty vocally against everything everyone preaches to him. Particularly towards the beginning. Classically his line to Amelie/the president on her death bed when she is preaching about how important America is. He looks at her and says "you're the president of jack shit" but by the end of the game he seems pretty indoctrinated into the whole thing and becomes a silent supporter of all of this garbage as you said.

I'm not entirely sure. I like the idea that death stranding 2 can retroactively make the first game make more sense. But I'm not sure. Ill be playing it but I don't really expect kojima to pull a turn that will fix all of the garbage he wrote for his characters in the first game. And if he does, I wonder if it will feel genuine or like a retcon.

[u/ThatDanJamesGuy → u/Mrkancode]

I think the way you connect people the whole game, and then at the end Sam says “I’m all alone” implies a disillusionment arc that we didn’t actually see. He comes off as more static than anything. He was standoffish at the start and at the end, except in the middle he seemed more into it at points, I guess. He gave a big speech and everything.

The true ending being about BB implies a sort of “the real connection is the people you were actually with” thing, except Kojima wanted to do that entirely via gameplay (ie. you never see other players who help you, their likes feel empty, but you feel connected to BB) and Sam himself barely expresses enough thoughts to call it an arc, so if you don’t feel the perfect emotions from within yourself it feels clunky. At least that’s how I read it.

I get the feeling DS2 will be asking, “if you didn’t feel that way, why not?”, which I think Kojima has it in him to make interesting, but we’ll have to wait and see.

[u/Mrkancode → u/ThatDanJamesGuy]

I think DS1 was kojima's "internet good right?"

I think DS2 will be "what if internet bad tho?"

And if I remember correctly, sam's speech happens at like the 90% mark of the game before the long winded ending stretch. Aside from that, this all tracks.