This past Saturday we had the last nice day of the year, and indeed the decade. It was a decent 50 degrees with no rain. I had to take this opportunity to use my legs. There's a spot not far from my house I just discovered. Take the outer trail and pass ponds and a sheer cliff face from where humans violently tore the ridge open to build some condos. (Also, if you slip through a hole in the fence, you can find a shack covered in graffiti where teenagers do weed.) It was while I was using my physical legs I had time to think about Death Stranding and why I hadn't reviewed it yet. Because while I loved being outdoors, I found myself a bit lonely. I was missing the single best thing of Death Stranding's experience.
Your main enemy in Death Stranding is steep terrain and your main tool is your body. It's a game where you feel the weight of a massive backpack. Carrying that weight down a steep hill is not a simple task. No, it's a complex strategic balance of knowing your character, Sam Bridges' limits. How much can his back can tilt before he falls over, how high can he hop other his obstacle, and when it is actually safest to run. He can twist his back in ways that horrify me while carrying 100 kilos of weight. But he can't safely jump down anything without falling over his ass. While the real me was inching down a steep hill with my non-digital meat legs this weekend, I was making the same moves as Sam. Do I dare slip on these leaves? Do I cut left to avoid this pack of mud? Do I grab this tree to steady myself? There's a full kinesthetic simulation within Death Stranding. That's impressive enough, but the game insists on also having a story and enemies.
Death Stranding has monsters and bandits and terrorists and invisible ghosts. However, they all seem to exist mostly to fill up space in a trailer. They're vestigial organs of the Metal Gear Solid games that director Hideo Kojima made up until his departure from Konami. You can go out and stealth your way through enemy bases. You can hide from the ghosts or even have intense boss fights with freaky monsters. All that exists as options in this game, though they’re more frustrating inconveniences than fun. Exploration itself is the fun here.
There has been this claim that Death Stranding's opening is very boring. Certainly, you do not have a proper combat experience for quite a way into the game. It is theoretically possible that you miss every enemy and not fight a single thing until the mandatory boss at the end of Chapter 2. Yet, nothing about the simple task of moving Sam's body through nature was boring to me. Finding the right way to ford a river with a Leaning Tower of Pisa of gear stacked on your back is actually fun. Certainly it feels better than when you're now inexplicably gunning down magical skeletons with a machine gun in World War I France.
An open world is only as good as the feeling of moving through it, and Death Stranding is entirely a game about that movement. Every stream, every rock, every cliff is an actual object that has a physical reality to it. It either impedes or aids your movement. You end up with same adventurous challenge that exploring the world in Breath of the Wild gave. If you’re tempted, you can ride your motorcycle up seemingly impossible terrain, daring gravity to stop you. (Don’t try it with the trucks though, they belong off-road as much as I do on a dance floor. It ends up painfully for everybody.)
The most visceral single gaming moment of Death Stranding in my forty hours of play was a moment where I decided to force my own short-cut between a mountain city and a lab up on a peak. I knew the path up would be basically sheer cliffs so came prepared with some ladders. But unfortunately, the route I had chosen was even rougher than I thought. After setting a ladder bridge to clear a gap and going over a few small cliffs I was out of them. Then I found myself before a ten-foot wall and no way to clear it. To my left now was a drop to certainly painful death. And to be my right was a huge cliff that would be completely impassible even if I had a hundred ladders. So, the only choice was to turn around, restock on supplies, and try again.
…Or do it my way. I’ve taken my share of inadvisable short-cuts while hiking in this world. A couple summers ago I got super lost and had to sneak through somebody’s backyard to get back to the street to escape. I once hopped a fence a hundred feet over the East River because the Parks Department decided the pedestrian bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx had to be locked at night. I’m stubborn that way. Sam, sadly, cannot climb at all, even he isn't loaded down with the weight of a full adult Rhino strapped to him.
I had to bluff the physics. I threw up ropes all over the weird rock face above me. Mr. Bridges was standing in spots that clearly Team Kojima never planned for the character to stand, he probably should have fallen to his death a few times. Eventually, through persistence, I managed to somehow swing high enough to safely jump to the top of the ten-foot cliff that stopped me in the first place. Behind me on the cliff there was a rat's nest of ropes that went nowhere. Another player gave me a Like for one of them.
I don’t know about you, but for me that story was a thousand times more thrilling than any giant supernatural whale monster. All you have to do to kill that is fire some rockets. It's ho-hum. Forcing your own path though, that's the gaming life I want to live.
It is funny to me how much Death Stranding is obsessed with the idea of "America" considering how little the game world looks like any America I know. I've been from one side of this continent to the other. I've seen the amber waves of grain and all those other cliched images in the song lyrics. My part of America is full of woods, shy deer, and terrifying highways that make life extremely dangerous for a wanderlustful pedestrian like myself. Death Stranding's world is either bare sullen hills, twisted fields of volcanic rock, or massive frozen alps. Sam isn't saving the New Jersey I hiked through this weekend, he's saving some Icelandic wilderness that might as well be on another planet.
But this alien place is still a rich and contemplative experience to move through on your own. I loved the solitude you have in this world. Imagine trudging slowly through the tops of the mountains in a blizzard all alone with your thoughts. Then just barely managing to get up steep inclines without collapsing. This is as close as a video game has managed to recreate that Romantic Era idea of "the sublime" as I have ever played. Death Stranding's nature is awesome and clearly more powerful than little Sam. Nature is the great power of this world, the player character has to just learn to exist with it.
In the story of Death Stranding, America has been torn apart by an invasion of antimatter ghosts and nonsense that will take longer than this entire piece to explain. Sam Bridges is a mailman who has also been given a side job of reconnecting the internet across all the scattered settlements filled with the holographic survivors of this apocalypse. Once the internet has been restored, it has a physical effect on the world itself. The single-player experience turns into a multiplayer collaborative effort.
That collaborative effort creates a paradox for me that deeply complicates my feelings on this game.
The positive is that Death Stranding is the rare post-apocalyptic game where you end up doing more good than harm. Your main mission is to help out people get their Amazon packages, so basically Death Stranding is Fetch Quest: The Game. You're always helping out the NPCs who never bother to thank you in person. They reward you with resources that you then use to make the path between each town and outpost easier to travel. Those resources then get funneled into various Public Works projects. Those can be as simple as leaving a ladder or rope behind to help climb up a cliff. Or they can be massive feats of engineering like reconstructing a highway between cities. Nothing you do in this game is selfish. The whole structure is an altruism machine.
Death Stranding connects you with players across the world. Not everything you build is actually shared across the system. I don't quite know how it works to be honest. But rarely a rope you leave behind will end up in some other player's game, and then you helped that random stranger complete his journey. You can grab a player's package that they lost to bandits and finish the job. All players join together in adding resources to the highways. Even if you finish the great work of remaking the interstate, you can't pretend it is just "your" highway. It's everybody's highway. It is a Public Good, made for everybody by everybody. Death Stranding will never let you have the fantasy of conquering the environment to build an individual empire.
But you are still conquering nature, even if it’s for the best vaguely socialist reasons. That experience of barely making it to the lab because you’re missing a ladder is lost. Because once you connect the internet up, other player’s objects appear in the game. Now there will almost always be a zipline somewhere, or a bridge somewhere. The sublime power of the environment is lost to a social experience. Nature has now been cluttered with abandoned trucks literally rusting away in a ditch. There are stupid signs all over the field. Messages pour with little details like you got 99 Likes for a rope. You’re never alone again.
Death Stranding is at least somewhat aware of the contraction. The highways are paved with this inky black substance that drips liquid evil upwards in defiance of gravity. If you need a visual metaphor for what our oil addiction is doing to the world, the snaking highways of Death Stranding aren’t bad. But these roads are also an absolute positive in terms of gameplay. They turn deliveries from struggles for survival to pleasant Sunday drives. They help everybody. Eventually the story implies that the internet you’re building may be hastening the apocalypse. But this doesn’t really matter in-game. Your main task remains connecting everybody and laying down pavement on the way. The question of when convenience should be sacrificed for the better of the world is never really addressed.
I’m not really asking that Death Stranding solve the problem of human interactions with the environment. This is a game that is making huge swings that often do not work. The story definitely misses more than it hits. We travel across time to these 20th century American history battlefields from France to Vietnam. But is this commentary on American foreign policy or just mindless shit that looks cool? Sam’s got a weird relationship with his mother that eventually spills into basically End of Evangelion by the climax. You perform an abortion on a ghost baby. Guillermo del Toro is a Frankenstein. Troy Baker’s character fell out of some hypothetical Metal Gear Solid VI and is having a ball hamming it up. Death Stranding is a huge game full of moments and crazy imagery, but how much is actually coherent?
If you consider everything about Death Stranding, maybe I should be happy the game exists in any form and mostly successful. Hideo Kojima is coming off a very bad break-up with Konami. This is his first game in over a decade that doesn’t involve Solid Snake in some way. We have seen how well high-profile “auteur” game developers do with their next project once they break free of the corporate structure. Death Stranding by rights should be the next Daikatana or Mighty No. 9 or Godus. We all know the horror stories by now. Sony is dumping the auteur theory on us thick with the marketing. Maybe it is just to sell the game to skeptical gamer audiences, maybe it's to distance themselves from a potential disaster.
Then throw in the absolute hubris that seems to surround everything about Death Stranding. It’s an ambitious video game marketed by weird as shit trailers involving babies living inside Norman Reedus and invisible ghosts. Kojima seems to have called in every favor he has to get the likenesses of actors like Mads Mikkelsen and Lea Seydoux into this project. Then got his favorite indie band, Low Roar, on the soundtrack. Death Stranding claims to be whatever a “Strand Game” is, some huge title that can simultaneously be about environment impact and the depersonalizing isolation of the social media age. This is bonkers.
Frankly, it’s a mixed bag. The ghosts are scary. Mads Mikkelsen is legitimately great and seems to naturally know how to play a Kojima script. But then the women are either mothers or sex objects, so the script tortures them by taking away their bodies or their wombs. (This is really not good stuff, Hideo.) The boss battles flatly suck ass. I grew very tired of the ghosts who would ruin my hiking fun. The NPCs are boring and I did not feel much need to save them. Some horny dev made zipped down a body bag to make sure you saw a corpse's cleavage in every shot. I set the game to Very Easy so I could skip the combat sequences faster.
And yet, I’d still call Death Stranding an absolute success. I'm tempted to even make it my Game of the Year just because I want more games to try this hard. No other game quite gets that thrill of exploration this way. More importantly, while most of the story is a ponderous house of cards best admired for its ambition than its successes, there is one thing that really works here. It was the one thing I missed most from Death Stranding while hiking IRL this weekend: BB.
Sam Bridges early on in the game is given an infant in a jar as his main companion. There is an explanation for this. But if you plan on enjoying Death Stranding, you have to learn to instinctively roll with this weirdness, because there's a lot more to come. You’re told by Franken del Toro-stein that the babies are just tools called “BBs” (Bridge Babies) used to hide from the killer ghosts. They can sense the ghosts so you know how to avoid them. You're not supposed to get attached. Instead I decided BB was my best friend in the world and I loved him unconditionally. The game expects this of you, by the third act Sam has given his BB a name and even Guillermo del Toro is overwhelmed by the cuteness.
But I think I was particularly taken by BB in Death Stranding. He’s just the best thing ever. Early on you will not have too many interactions since all he can do is cry when he gets scared of the ghosts or when you trip. To sooth him, you have to rock your DualShock 4 like it’s a cradle in one of the cleverer uses of motion controls. Then BB feels better. Later he’ll start to giggle when you perform certain actions. He gives Likes if you have Norman Reedus make funny faces in a mirror. He lost his damn mind in hysterical giggles when I peed on some rocks. (Oh, you can pee in this game.) If you stare at his jar he’ll give you thumbs up or blow heart-shaped bubbles. Yes, his crying makes the already annoying combat sequences intolerable. However, if you take him to the hot springs to relax, he’ll swim around in his jar like a little goldfish in a bag.
The 2010s in gaming have been so much the story of old dads dealing with middle age and their kids growing up. Between Geralt, Joel, Kratos, and Bowser, this decade has been all about sexy Dad Bods and the children who want to be independent of them. Again, Death Stranding is a dad game, but at least it’s a new dad game. It is about those first months of taking home a new life and falling in love with this thing you’ve brought into the world. I also can appreciate that this game isn’t subtle about the maternity metaphors. BB’s jar is essentially a womb, he’ll show up literally inside Sam’s stomach if you die. I said last year that Kratos was not maternal enough and this was a huge negative to the new God of War. Death Stranding is a game where you get to be mother and father to your little buddy.
Just as Kojima could not quite link back his antisocial theory with his environmentalism theory, I cannot really link together whatever is going on with my Biological Clock and my original topic of hiking in a neat way. Maybe what Death Stranding is showing me is that I’m nearly thirty. I could hike alone forever, but maybe I need a little buddy to come with me. Somebody needs to teach the next generation to ignore fences, right? What's the point of exploring the world if you have nobody to show it to?
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