Death Stranding
PS4
Well, at least we finally get to preview Hideo Kojima’s new game. With 40 hours on the clock, we’re barely halfway through Death Stranding: that would not be enough to base a review on even if we hadn’t agreed to abstain from reviewing the game until we’d seen its credits roll – something we’re not sure has ever been asked of us before.
Ever since its announcement, Kojima has shrouded his game beneath a veil of secrecy. Forty hours later, we’re not entirely sure why, at least not without breaking out the conspiracy theories. It is a delivery simulator, as protagonist Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) works his way across a ruined United States. Starting in the far east, his ultimate goal is the west coast, stopping off at cities, distro centres and outposts, connecting them to the ‘chiral network’ and bringing the nation back online, and its people back together. In practice, the route is far more complex than that – there’s a tremendous amount of to, fro and backtracking – but the game only rarely departs from its core concept of having you load up with cargo, take it somewhere far away, and then do it all again.
Said cargo is physically based, and forms the game’s central mechanic, which is unfortunate given it’s a gigantic pain in the backside. Turn too quickly, struggle on an incline or pick up too much speed on a slope and Bridges will tip over, requiring a squeeze of one of the triggers to have him tighten his backpack strap, or a press of both at once to stabilise him fully. It’s a heck of a thing to base an entire game on, let alone one in a vast world, full of oppressively harsh terrain, that you will mostly traverse on foot. If the idea of trudging three kilometres with both triggers held down excites you, you’re in for a treat.
The pain recedes a little in the second area when you’re given your first exoskeleton, which increases your weight limit and strengthens your balance. Yet that is offset by the fact you’re carrying more stuff, and the terrain in the second act is even less friendly. As your toolset grows – the opening area’s ladders and climbing anchors are joined by 3D printers (which can build structures, though the bigger ones require you to contribute stacks of heavy materials), equippable clothing and skeletons, and a growing arsenal – and mission-critical cargo gets heavier, so too must the load on your back. Without knowing exactly what you’ll face, the smart course of action is to carry everything you might need.
By this point you’ll have access to your first vehicle, a motorbike that handles like we coded it, and wrestled it up a rocky hillside or two. Later you’ll acquire a truck, though this is only useful if you’re prepared to put in
the hours ferrying materials around to build a road network. Floating carriers will bear loads for you, so Bridges is less likely to topple over after bumping into a rock, but they mean you’ll be moving at walking pace and are as prone to wearying slapstick falls as the protagonist. If you can witness a trolley’s tether inexplicably snap after a physics freakout, sending 80kg of cargo tumbling over a cliffside, without questioning if this is all really worth it, you’re made of stronger stuff than us.
Indeed, at times we wonder whether Kojima has set out to make an arch sort of meta-satire on the concept of games being fun. The UI is an overbearing clutter of bars and icons by which we are still persistently flumoxed, and includes a radial menu which, because of the size of your inventory, is actually three or four radial menus switchable by clicking a stick. Positioning Bridges just so to bring up a specific prompt is a nightmare: each button has multiple, context-sensitive functions, and a man with 80kg on his back doesn’t exactly turn on a sixpence. Even stealth, the mechanic that made Kojima a star, is a letdown: you creep across open ground to evade enemies that float six feet in the air, are highly sensitive to sound and can teleport.
Should one of these BTs, as they’re styled, spot you they’ll surround you with a pool of inky gloop out of which moaning cadavers will emerge to try to pull you down. If they succeed they’ll pull you over to a much bigger foe in an even larger pool of goo. At first, you’ll simply need to escape. Later, you’ll gain new tools that enable you to fight back. The threat of BTs turning up while you’re on a delivery is constant, though it’s not death you fear, merely the faff of seeing them off then backtracking to hoover up lost cargo. The same applies to MULEs, a human enemy faction whose camps are set up in the most inconvenient spots. Fighting them is easy enough, but if things go wrong – either because you get swarmed or because the game misreads or ignores your inputs – you’ll lose your cargo, and will have to sneak back into their base to reclaim it. We learn quickly, and resort to taking the long way round their camps. Hence, 40 hours later, we’re on the fifth of 12 chapters.
In our kinder moments, we wonder whether Kojima’s aim is to make more mechanical hay out of the open-world journey, which in other games can feel like a sort of interactive loading screen. But the journey is all Death Stranding has. Your destination involves checking in at a terminal and listening to a few lines of dialogue from a grainy hologram of an NPC, most of them played by one of Kojima’s Hollywood pals. Then it’s another order, another load of cargo to balance, and back out on the road, the steadily depleting bar that measures the state of Bridges’ footwear mirroring the arc of your enthusiasm for it all. At least he can always 3D print himself a new pair.
In fairness, there’s something about Death Stranding. Even when it is boring, it is still somehow interesting; we have certainly never played anything quite like it before; it is a game we keep finding ourselves thinking about during idle moments away from it. Whether those are compliments or not, we’re not sure. We retain, despite our better instincts, a note of optimism for the back half of the game.
Perhaps the story will rescue it. Currently we haven’t seen enough of it to judge. Thanks to all those lengthy journeys, the narrative is leadenly paced, and when it does pick up – typically in a sharp right turn just before a set-piece – it rarely feels earned in the context of what has come before. In between, there’s plenty of fourth-wall breaking, particularly when Bridges is in a ‘private room’, where he can sleep and freshen up in between deliveries. He’ll look into the camera, wink, and gesture towards the shower; have him use the toilet and, bizarrely, the door that slides across contains an advert for Ride, an AMC show in which Reedus gives celebrity pals a takie on his motorbike. Quite what we’re supposed to make of all that is anyone’s guess, but in fairness that’s a recurring theme. Expect our final verdict next month – providing we can stagger over the finish line, anyway.
We wonder if this is an arch sort of meta-satire on the concept of games being fun