Death Stranding
PC, PS4
Your conflict is with the world rather than anyone in it. This isn’t so much a walking sim as a stumbling sim
Developer Kojima Productions
Publisher SIE
Format PC, PS4 (tested)
Release Out now (PS4), 2020 (PC)
Sam Porter Bridges sighs as he waits for a zipline to be 3D printed into existence. “Patience is a virtue, I guess,” he mutters. Quite so. It’s a lesson we’ve learned in our time with Hideo Kojima’s latest opus. Half an hour prior, we witness the deliveryman stumble forward into a rocky overhang, causing several of the packages piled up on his back to roll all the way down the steep incline we’ve just climbed. Elsewhere, he inexplicably strides into a river instead of stepping onto the ladder spanning it. Listing to the left, his teetering tower collides with the makeshift bridge, the current sweeping half the load downstream. Not so much a virtue, then, as a minimum requirement.
Physics and control flubs notwithstanding, that’s precisely the point in a game designed as a break from your average open-world gig. The titular event has left the US in ruins – so broken that it looks like Iceland – and it’s your job, in a typically unsubtle subversion of Trumpian rhetoric, to ‘make America whole again’. You traipse between small colonies – Knots – delivering resources and tying them together via the ‘chiral network’, a kind of surrogate Internet. You’ll encounter threats, from groups of bandits to BTs, spectral entities bound to our world by wispy strands. But the challenge lies in keeping cargo intact; the rain here accelerates the age of anything it touches, the condition of your packages deteriorating unless you can find shelter.
Your conflict, then, is with the world rather than anyone in it. This isn’t so much a walking sim as a stumbling sim, as you struggle against the elements and uneven ground. A rain-slicked downslope can be as dangerous as a trek through snow, the only difference being the speed of your steps. Even a molehill-sized bump on flat ground can cause problems, the packages attached to your back, shoulders and hips all impeding your balance, speed and stamina as you squeeze either trigger to right yourself – though it’s often easier to keep both held down for the duration. Journeys between waypoints are rarely more than a means to an end; in Death Stranding, they’re the whole game.
Up to a point, it works. When a Knot comes into view, the soles of your boots having worn away, the packages on your back visibly rusted, Sam breathing heavily as his stamina meter nears zero, the relief is as potent as the thrill of a new discovery in Breath Of The Wild. When you hand in a delivery that you’ve managed to keep in good nick, it’s hard to deny the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s the effort heuristic in full effect: the arduousness of the journey and the gratefulness of your recipients convinces you that this is worthwhile work.
Endless positive reinforcement drills that home; likewise, when you graduate from leaving ladders and climbing ropes to building and upgrading structures to help yourself and others. Against the bleakly beautiful landscapes, these man-made constructions are an eyesore, though that’s in keeping with the theme of humanity’s environmental impact. Collectively, they make life easier – bikes and trucks, which handle appallingly, are only worth using once a strip of tarmac lets you bypass terrorist territory. Thus, having spent years ignoring such advice, we end up smashing that ‘like’ button to reward our fellow builders. Yet these digital pats on the back and the ranking system at the end of each delivery spoil the idea of this being a purely altruistic mission (and at worst, cheapen the value of human life: a few hundred likes to rescue a loved one?). And if the game is most satisfying when conquering its toughest challenges, then removing those little frictions surely lessens the sense of achievement. It begins to feel like woke Twitter: performative do-gooding for likes and the accompanying dopamine hit.
Besides, with persistence, Death Stranding isn’t that difficult. Resist the temptation to sprint everywhere and you’ll only have trouble during the BT encounters. Should they spot you – and given their habit of teleporting just as you’re about to sever their cord, you’ll sometimes alert them through no fault of your own – you’ll need to drag yourself slowly through an oily lake, hammering Square to shake them off. We revert to tiptoeing past them while crouching, and they stop being a problem. Indeed, action interludes, including three shooting sequences, appear to have been designed to make the walking parts look good by comparison.
While you’ll certainly feel more attached to the world than the people in it, Death Stranding isn’t quite as new as some have suggested. When we squeeze the triggers to grip onto a rock, we’re reminded of Grow Home. As Reedus heaves himself back up to his feet after a fall, we flashback to Hyper Light Drifter’s wounded hero. The Stillness Of The Wind tells a story of solitude, backbreaking labour and finding purpose in a hardscrabble life – and more efficiently, too. Sky: Children Of The Light invites you to help others negotiate tricky environments while providing a stronger sense of human connection. And we haven’t forgotten how Q-Games’ sadly departed The Tomorrow Children encouraged its players to toil together to create a better kind of dystopia. As for the novelty of building things other players can use in a shared world, might we introduce you to an obscure indie gem called Minecraft?
But pause, as Death Stranding often invites us to do, and consider the bigger picture. There is, after all something quietly revelatory about a big-budget videogame that has as much in common with the work of Bennett Foddy as Ubisoft’s boilerplate sandboxes. Far from a masterpiece, then, but Kojima’s first postKonami release has laid the foundations for something greater. Which is fitting, since that’s what he’s had us doing for 60-odd hours.