I have been playing an excessive amount of Death Stranding over the last few days. On paper it does not seem like a game I would necessarily enjoy. I remember when it launched on the PS4 it was universally lauded as a flop or as a “Walking Simulator”. However there is a quiet brilliance here that seems perfect for the time in which we are living currently. We find ourselves in a scenario of dealing with a pandemic that keeps us separated in ways that we are not used to and many are struggling with this reality. Death Stranding is a game where a cataclysmic event has separated what is left of humanity into a bunch of disconnected pockets, and your role as a “porter” is to deliver packages and also link all of these people up into a shared global network.
Fundamentally it is in fact a game about transporting cargo between point A and point B and attempting to do so as safely as possible. You are graded based on how much damage the cargo took, and believe me that cargo is constantly taking damage. However what is happening behind the scenes is the interesting part when you talk to the individuals at the destinations who are grateful that you risked your life to cross the wastes to bring them something they desperately need… like medication. Essentially you are in a time of vast networks of 3D printers that can replicate almost anything, but anything organic or very specific needs to still be transported by hand.
The most interesting aspect of the game for me is how your actions and the actions of other players are constantly impacting your decisions. I brought with me three ladders and ended up using them at the top of this waterfall to create a path that future porters would be able to cross safely. Me laying down those ladders worked on top of the efforts of those who came before me, because there are a total of I believe nine ladders that make up what is effectively a safe way to cross. That isn’t to say it didn’t terrify me to cross it, especially while hauling a bunch of mission critical cargo behind me… knowing that one slip would probably send it all plummeting down the falls and become unrecoverable.
The other really interesting thing about the game is how players are impacting the world in ways that are directly obvious. See this dirt path that is in front of me? This was not here a few days ago when I started playing. This represents a path that players are carving through the world, and as I understand it data is being collected about player movement and this is then impacting the terrain of the world around you. So a common footpath turns into a place where the grass is worn down and eventually ends up in an area of exposed dirt. These don’t always appear in the most efficient paths, but more the most commonly and as a result easiest to travel paths for transporting cargo. If you are adventurous there is still plenty of room to carve out your own path however.
On the podcast this weekend, I described the game as what if you were playing Fallout in a world where all of the Vaults were active and you were instead playing a caravan leader delivering goods between them all. There are definite moments where it feels Fallout-like, especially any time you are called to explore the ruins of some part of civilization from the fall of humanity. Instead of Deathclaws however, you are left to content with BTs or Beached Things that you can choose to deal with either through sneaking around them or later in the game by outright attacking them with weapons that have been developed specifically to deal with them.
The thing that I did not expect, is that I have actually started to grow my BB or Bridge Baby. There is more happening here with this child in a bottle than I initially expected, and as you encounter bad things you have to take its mental state into account. Soothing the BB ends up making it produce these heart shaped air bubbles and increases the bond between you two… and as a result its effectiveness in detecting bad things as well as its ability to handle psychological strain. The whole thing is a really strange concept, and I did not at all expect that I would slowly find myself being attached to the little runt and taking actions that I know specifically that will make it happy. For example when you are running with the speed exoskeleton you can make these massive leaps, and the hang time seems to make the kid extremely happy… so I find myself trying to plot a course that is going to allow me to do a bunch of them in the process.
I am still not entirely certain why I like this game as much as I do, however for now I am mostly just rolling with it. Death Stranding is exploration porn, and roaming the wastes is gorgeous. Right now I am more or less roaming around the same neck of the woods trying to “finish” with a few objectives before moving forward the story. I am specifically trying to convince a few individuals that joining the network in full is a good idea, and trying to track down missions specific to them in order to gain favor. There are so many interesting cameos and references going on, and I realize this is not going to be the game for everyone. However for me it seems to hit all of the right notes and is the sort of game that apparently I need to be playing right now. I will be sad once my journey is finished.
Before reading this article, I knew nothing about Death Stranding.
Not going to lie, the baby in a bottle is an little creepy. But the game itself looks like it could be relaxing, especially if it were a VR experience.