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Review of Death Stranding. Sperm and Corpse Transfer Is It Brilliant?
Butcher79
After many years of thinking about what Death Stranding in fact, I can finally say that this is a game made entirely of quests. Forty-odd hours of such a game may seem like torture, but in fact, it's a hell of a lot of fun!
United America
History Death Strandings very strange. I'll spare you the convoluted lexicon that Hideo Kojima created to describe every obscure Paranormal Activity, but here's a quick version: most of America disappeared because ghosts appeared and killed people. When these people died, their bodies exploded. And the people who fell under these explosions also exploded. The original event was named "exit death“and it wiped out a very large portion of the American population. All that's left are small, walled city-states, completely cut off from each other.
Now there is an urgent need for "porters" - people tasked with delivering supplies to various cities, risking their skins in the dangerous wastelands of America - in this new, fractured country. That's where Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus) comes into play. He has gained a reputation as a top-notch porter and is recruited by the president, who is also his mom (!) - to travel the wastelands and bring isolated cities back to the fold by connecting them to a bizarre data network. “If we don’t come together again, humanity will not survive,” the president says.
This all sounds pretty grand, but the actual process of reconnecting cities is much simpler: Sam goes there, asks if they're ready for it, and reconnects them during a cutscene. Some of the residents take some convincing action, asking Sam for a favor or two before he can plug in the ethernet cable. Then, once they are online, Sam will continue his journey to the West.
Actual walking in Death Stranding is incredibly difficult, with every little rock or ledge capable of dropping Sam, sending his packs flying. I am constantly scanning the environment, exploring the terrain to find the smoothest path possible through the dangerous rocky trek. There is no automatic parkour or physics-defying climbing here. Every step I take must be deliberate, otherwise I may seriously fall. When I overload my backpack, I have to use the left and right triggers to balance my weight or I risk falling and damaging my merchandise. It's equally interesting and frustrating when I tip over after twisting my ankle, forcing myself to pack all my things again. In general, this is a walking simulator in the literal sense.
Kojima and his team dedicate the first 10 hours of Death Strandings to breaking down gameplay with melodramatic cutscenes that seek to explain the game's world. These cutscenes are outrageously overdubbed and lengthy, often stating (and then repeating) the same points over and over, dragging the pace of the introduction to the point of absurdity. This is Kojima's game, after all, and he's very wordy as always.
Sam is also on a quest to save his sister Amelie (a digitally rejuvenated Lindsey Wagner) from a terrorist known as Higgs (Troy Baker). He goes on this quest with his mother, President Bridget (also Lindsey Wagner). He works for Bridges, who appears to be some sort of Federal Corporation and is run by a masked character called, if you can believe it, Die Hard (Tommy Earl Jenkins). He is visited by a mysterious woman in a rubber suit with a pointed umbrella named Fragile (Lea Seydoux). He communicates via a Metal Gear-style codec with a team of Bridges boffins: Deadman (Guillermo del Toro), Heartman (Nicholas Winding Refn) and Mama (Margaret Qualley). And there are visions of a mysterious man played by Mads Mikkelsen who seems to be connected to his BB.
This BB is the unborn child that Sam wears on his chest in a tiny sarcophagus. He helps him connect with the world of the dead, which is called the beach because... well, because it's a beach. This makes it easier for him to perceive BTS, or washed up things. Sam has a condition called dooms, which is not well explained, and also "repatriatewhich brings him back from death. Any other person who dies must be cremated immediately or risk creating a "void" when their body is taken over by BTs, exploding in the process. In this world, killing people is really inappropriate.
Courier on duty
It takes about 10 hours to clear the mind and understand the mechanics and structure of the game. And that 10 hours is one of the weakest in the game, thanks to endless cutscenes and a series of actions that have me hauling packages (and even a corpse!) up steep hills in the rain. I never had any particular reason for these original duties; I do them because they tell me I have to. This is complete nonsense, and it's easy to imagine that many players will never get past this segment of the game.
But even if you do, here's the thing: the whole game is about dragging packages. This is what you will do when you control Sam: carry the box or boxes from one part of the map to another. Speaking it out loud, it sounds like absolute misery.
However, something shifted in me after those first 10 hours. The core loop of many open-world games is that you start out as a tiny nobody and, over dozens of hours of exploring a wide area, gain amazing abilities to become a walking god. But this never actually happens in Death Stranding. Sam essentially has the same powers at the end of the story as he did at the beginning. A few handy fixtures and a little extra carrying capacity, perhaps. But generally speaking, he's just a regular guy with a stack of boxes.
The combat sequences highlight his limited skill set, as he's better off avoiding conflict rather than dealing with it head-on. Random missions that require Sam to mix him up with people as he goes down his delivery route seems almost an afterthought compared to his normal day to day labors.
Something does evolve over the course of the game, but it's not Sam; is the world around him. I put a ladder on the ground, creating a makeshift bridge to cross the river, which could destroy some of my cargo. This ladder then has a chance to appear in other players' games, facilitating their own journey across the river. The same thing happens in reverse, when I suddenly start to see useful ropes, ladders and footpaths appearing in this ruined America, placed there by other people playing the game.
These player-created structures don't appear until I bring a certain region online. These areas are barren and wild when I begin to explore them, but over time they gradually become civilized, with some areas drastically transforming in the process.
There are many dangers in the world Death Stranding, and the aforementioned ghosts that provided all the mess are some of the worst. They are called BTS and make the open world incredibly dangerous to traverse its plains, requiring stealth and constant awareness.
Sam's baby, enclosed in a jar, is the star during these sequences. Humans can't spot ghosts with the naked eye, but BBs can. However, it does not offer you a radar on the minimap. All you get is constant flashing and aiming at Sam's back mechanical arm, which BB controls, to indicate the location of the nearest ghost. There are ways to handle bets aggressively later in the game, but in the early hours you just have to avoid them as quietly as possible. This proves especially difficult when you're lugging a suitcase full of - let me check my notes - oh yes, cum at some point. At least it's better than a corpse?
There is one acre that I keep crossing for supplies and it's teeming with BTs. Whenever I accidentally get hooked, sticky resin appears around my legs. I once spent too much time in the mud and suddenly I was dragged 50 feet by a massive, resin-coated sea beast that didn't seem to care too much about the much needed cum I was carrying.
The world around me was transformed when the tar appeared everywhere, leaving only a few safe places to jump. I had no idea what was going on or why, but all of a sudden I had to run from this thing, trying to collect my lost things amidst the chaos. It was an outrageous visual spectacle, and I didn't really want to keep seeing it, as it definitely made the task much more difficult.
But I slowly make my way through the troubles, time after time becoming a real master of catching ghosts. While I became adept at these sequences, I wouldn't say I had fun. It's more like a Marco Polo game, but instead of asshole cousins around the pool, there are monster whales nearby.
So I decide to invest. Instead of lugging another bag, I load Sam's backpack with a ton of materials and come out with a plan: I'm going to build a damn highway right over these ghosts. It requires thousands of materials (earned from completing quests for different cities) and can be a huge resource drain, but it's worth it. After construction, the road stretches directly above the ground, where the BTS hang, completely neutralizing them. An area that used to take me 10 minutes of careful stealth now takes seconds.
Not only is my highway saving me tons of time, it's also starting to show up in my friends' games. They send me photos of them driving on my highway, thanking me for the investment. It's extremely enjoyable, even if it ruins the natural splendor of this once-wild Scandinavian landscape. The outlook in Death Stranding is amazing.
There are more opportunities to build and civilize this land as the game continues. After all, the world is unrecognizable from the pristine wilderness that you first decided to explore and connect. Now it's a courier's paradise, where every nook and cranny is designed to make every shipment a little easier to deliver. You are literally optimizing the world. Putin would be delighted.
Interestingly, for a game that has a lot to do with politics, family struggles, and the nature of humanity, it never comments on the potential downsides of this loss of natural beauty. Apparently it's all great! I can't argue with that because thanks to the progress, I'm now getting speed over those damn tar demons on my amazing highway.
It can be said that the satisfaction I felt in building the road would have been blunted if I had reached this point earlier (i.e. without the drawn-out, slogan intro of the game). If not for the suffering, I might not have appreciated the end of this suffering. In short, does standing death just give me a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome? Does it matter?
Kojima gives, Kojima takes...
Having been blown away by Death Stranding's core world-building gameplay, I'm stunned to realize that many of the game's strongest, most compelling gameplay ideas (particularly world-building and collaboration) are discarded in the final acts in favor of a much more linear, scripted, story-driven experience. The freedom and sense of ownership that I enjoyed creating this world is shattered in favor of explaining and ending a story that never really mattered to begin with.
The last 10 hours of Death Stranding are a mess, as are the first 10 hours as my leash goes from emotional monologue to ridiculous boss fight to emotional monologue. While some of these narrative threads make sense and land with some seriousness, others sound like the ravings of someone at speed who thinks they've figured out how the universe works.
Death Stranding feels like two games in one, designed for seemingly opposing audiences. The first is a completely unique open world adventure with asynchronous co-op multiplayer that makes me feel like I'm part of a community building the world from the ground up. And the other is a long, convoluted, deeply weird film. The former pulls most of the weight, but they share equal screen time. And like a steamer full of cum, it's impossible to separate the good from the bad. All this in one box.
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