Death Stranding

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.

I played something last night, and I have to admit I am not entirely certain what type of game I played. There are a few things you have to understand going into this. First I have never played another Kojima game that I am aware of. I missed the whole Metal Gear Solid thing, in part because I don’t really love stealth games and whichever one I tried first… I believe Solid on the PS1 had some early stealth mechanics. Secondly I more or less ignored Death Stranding when it came out on the PS4 because it had already been announced for the PC at that point, and I figured I would just wait and play it on my system of choice. It is very rarely that I will choose to play a game on a console that is not the Switch over my beloved PC.

Most of the world is going to come into this game with specific expectations or opinions, but I figure I am entering from fairly fresh terms. My initial thought is that this might be one of the most gorgeous games that I have ever played. We were off to a rough start because I did what every PC gamer does when they first get a new game… open up the options and check out the graphical settings. I am not sure why this is a thing, but it absolutely is… and I was greeted by my game crashing to desktop. I immediately turned around and tried to configure the settings through GeForce Experience, but it also seemed to have trouble reading the settings, so in the end I just went with whatever the game detected which seemed to be perfectly reasonable for 4k at 60 fps.

The opening of the game feels more like the opening of a movie, with each actor announced any time they are on screen and in what was ultimately the opening credits. You are presented this view of the world which seems dark and brooding but also at the same time full of unexpected life. The pictures don’t really do this experience justice, because it honest to god feels like I am watching big sweeping panoramic shots at the beginning of a movie as they give us a glimpse into the world we are about to explore. I knew enough going in to realize this has more or less been damned to the term “walking simulator” but I am largely okay with that. I have been bouncing between games and figured it was worth a shot to see how well the pacing of the game fits with my current mood.

You play as Sam Porter Bridges, which seems like a name but appears to be a designation in this world. Sam is a Porter and works for the Bridges organization… so Sam Porter Bridges. There are others that work for other organizations like one called Fragile, and appear to be named accordingly. Ultimately you are existing in what is a post apocalyptic landscape, and this particular apocalypse is an event called the Death Stranding, which I don’t fully understand. What I do understand however is that when someone dies, it is important that they be incinerated or some event happens which causes an explosion of this black goo that appears to have a malevolence and drags anything it touches down into it.

At the beginning of the game you are sent on a mission to incinerate a corpse, and a bunch of “BT” entities show up which apparently stands for “Beached Thing”. Your character has DOOMs, which is apparently a psychic connection to the world of the dead allowing you to sense them. I accidentally triggered one of them and what transpired was some of the most terrifying game play I have experienced. An eruption this black ooze appeared underneath my character and several oil slick figures started trying to claw me down into… but I was able to escape barely which set me running from whatever it was. The oil slick coalesced into a tentacled monster of a sort that kept chasing me and firing volleys of the black ooze at me, eventually giving up chase as I climbed a nearby rocky precipice. I am maybe going to have nightmares in the future about the sequence… but it did immediately underline the danger of being discovered by one of these things.

The core gameplay appears to be you running around this green waste picking up packages and delivering to their intended destination. There is a lot of nuance to this, and travel itself is a challenge as you load yourself up like a pack mule there is a constant concern of tipping over or slipping and falling down causing your cargo to tumble behind you. There are some really interesting mechanics of how one stays upright and a stamina meter that feels very reminiscent of Breath of the Wild that dictates for how long you can manage to forcibly stay upright. The over arching mission is to reconnect humanity which now lives in a scattered and disconnected series of city states. Reconnecting the world uncovers bits of long forgotten tech and allows you to do more things.

Now we get to the part of this discussion where I talk about the nonsense of this game. Firstly like I said before I have never played anything by Kojima before. I was not exactly prepared to be expected to take seriously names like “Deadman” and “Die-Hardman” like they are completely normal. I have no clue what is going on with the skull mask, but I figure by the end of the game we will have likely learned something about it. I assume there is some facial scaring or something… or that he got caught in the “Timefall” which is a rain that prematurely ages everything it touches. So many weird things are going on in the game that you just sorta have to roll with it and accept them at face value until you learn more about them.

What I was not really expecting however was the shameless product placement. You spend a lot of time in your “private room”, which appears to exist in pretty much every outpost that you encounter. In it is always a constant supply of Monster Energy drink, the old fashioned green and black can version. If you drink one, you are given a stamina boost that seems to last for the next mission. It is something that you ultimately want to do given it seems to help, and the game is seemingly designed around you having that extra little bit of stamina. It does make me wonder exactly how much was spent on this promotion, or if this is just one of those inside jokes that Kojima thought was funny? Maybe he is a Monster chugging addict or something.

The other product placement that I find hilarious is that any time you go to use the toilet, a modesty screen pops up with an ad for Ride with Norman Reedus. Since the actor plays such a major role in the game, I am wondering what sort of quid pro quo behind the scenes occurred to make this happen. I does make me wonder if at some point during the game we are going to see an advertisement for something related to Guillermo Del Toro since he also very prominently plays the character of “Deadman”. In the grand scheme of things I can look past it, because it doesn’t really bother me that much but it is something that will pretty well yank you back from any sort of immersion quickly.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from this game, and like I said I more or less went into it with a fairly clean slate. The end result however was rather enjoyable and I expect to be playing some more of it. There is something relaxing about the combination of having to struggle your way across the landscape while watching out for lost packages and listening to a rather chill soundtrack. I can see how for a lot of people this was an unexpected and frustrating experience, but I am enjoying myself. It is very much not an action game, apart from very small segments of action playing out when something goes terribly wrong. I am interested to find out more tidbits about this world and its setting however so for the time being I am hooked.