Death Stranding: The Definitive Review

Six Years Late, I Get It Together And Dive Off The Deep End

One great podcast topic I’d happily listen to would be about the games that professionals didn’t play, namely the idea that everyone who’s written about games in a pro context has at least one notable title that slipped them by. It would certainly be interesting to get an educated take on a significant title which a pro critic has no experience of playing, if only to see how the game’s discourse affects opinion. I, of course, have fucking shitloads I can mention, so maybe I should make it a topic for my eternally upcoming podcast series (which I promise will still happen at some point in the future). One of my most egregious notables would have been Death Stranding if it wasn’t for the fact that I have now played it. And played it quite a bit. And given how much I adored The Phantom Pain, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that I absolutely love Death Stranding.

What fascinated me most about its opening segments was how Death Stranding feels like it sprang from Hideo having a good old wander in Metal Gear Solid V. I felt an oddly familiar symmetry with the tutorial yomp and the opening stages of The Phantom Pain, in that spot where Oceleot lets you off the leash and into the terrain. I remember abandoning the horse fairly rapidly and trying to negotiate the hard Afghan hillsides on foot, as well as raiding various compounds and encampments without incurring helicopter-bound map reloads on the way. There’s a ruined fort out on some high plain in the Afghan map that I distinctly recall walking quite some distance to reach, and feeling this sense of Metal Gear Solid becoming gloriously unbounded, as if the embryonic vignettes found in Snake Eater and Guns Of The Patriots had been allowed to fully blossom. Just as The Phantom Pain felt like a playful expansion of Peace Walker’s secondary intergame, Death Stranding feels like a playful expansion of The Phantom Pain’s world traversal. It’s a link that perhaps only Kojima could get budget for at this level, though in a glorious act of expectation defiance, he’s also shifted the goalposts towards a game about helping, which in the modern age feels as iconoclastic and daringly transgressive an act as you’d ever expect from the pinnacle AAA tier. More transitionally, I was thrilled that Death Stranding doesn’t seem to suffer from the same kind of incongruity with set-piece interjections that were part-and-parcel of the Metal Gear Solid experience. Rather than wedging a chase sequence or on-rails segment into the player’s arc, Death Stranding seems to incorporate key events into the game’s fundamental behaviours, blending them more naturally into the ebb and flow of map-crossing traversals. It’s an approach that I’d say is far more mature, marking a novel kind of sobriety in how you apply the cadence of progressive play when the environmental traversal comes first. At the very least, it’s a far more cohesive integration of plot-point action into the player’s biography. In The Phantom Pain, and even as far back as Guns Of The Patriots, being pulled out of the standard business of stealthin’ around to loudly shoot things from the back of a lorry, or trying to fell some impossibly giant mech, felt like being yanked out of a modern videogame and into some 20th century arcade cabinet. No matter the boombast, the quality of the assets, the scale or intensity, they were always interruptions I ultimately would resent. I’m thankful that halfway through Death Stranding, I’ve not had it happen yet. Getting utterly confused in BT fights has happened, however, but that seems very much in keeping with the general vibe. I mean, it’s a fucking jet-black whale fucking you up in a massive pool of tar after you’ve been dragged around by spectral figures - I’d suggest the intent here was to put you somewhat off-balance at the very least. The gung-ho theatrics of Metal Gear Solid’s worst militarist excesses would probably be tiresome if they were offered as the sole means of escape.

Thankfully, other Kojima signatures have been translated beautifully. A fascinating aspect is the obsession with functional design and mechanical details. Obviously fetishised in the militaria of the Metal Gear universe, it takes a novel twist with Death Stranding’s love of the fastener and the strap, of the anti-tamper tape and the container. There’s a resolution of detail that easily matches that of a co-obsessive, Ridley Scott. I can see a kindred love of the steadfastly solid, the overtly functional. You see it in the environment suits and kit of Alien through to Prometheus and Covenant, and yet it’s there, just as richly and keenly detailed in Death Stranding’s rendering of specialist workwear clothing and means of attaching things, or storing things, or moving things. It’s a real treat to see Kojima’s obsessional eye move from the army to the outward bound, forging a new harmony between the gear of contemporary mountain climbing and the speculative equipment of the futuristic on-foot technocourier. You can see Kojima’s romance with plastic strap clips and velcro squares and the keenly detailed topography of woven fabrics, which get just as much love lavished upon them as any militaristic fetishwear in the Metal Gears. But I also loved the aging effects; the rusting and degrading of sturdy containers and vehicles carries its own romance when contextualised against the ancient environments that form the majority of the game’s terrain. A reminder that time and the elements will always win over technology.

I’ve made no secret of my love of simply being within a beautifully-realised virtual space and so I wasn’t surprised at all that Death Stranding is fucking great in that regard. It’s frequently stunning. Contemplating the environment as you walk through it seems to be almost the point of the entire endeavour, with the acquisitional rewards of the game masked behind performance rankings in clearing jobs and other activities. It pays to just work through the jobs and trust that the rewards will come rather than planning out some arc of optimal upgrades, which prevents the game becoming a tick-list of busywork and grounds you in the fundamental experience. It seems that engaging in a wholly directionless manner, just to see what happens as you literally follow orders, is the best way to be. A vibe that suits Sam’s easy-going manner to a tee. Of course the environments are gorgeous, but I was struck by how the first two maps make such a symmetry of land and water, plain and slope. Death Stranding is as much a celebration of the basics of landscape as it is of connecting people or the charity of undertaking gruelling work to help others. I also loved that coming to it six years too late means the world is littered with evidence of others helping me. The ladders and lines, bridges, roads, signs, shelters. All are forging a curious balance between the unspoilt wilds and conveniences that come from human intervention. This strikes a far deeper chord about the game’s unspoken commentaries than I expected. As the humans reconnect through Sam, all the other Sams, working as a grand superposition within a per-player multiverse, serve to build the physical infrastructures of those connections. This emphasises the structural changes that humans impose on their environments, and in a deeper step, outlines the traces of how humans use technology to alter their spaces and themselves. The way the game’s formal social structures present Sam as being as much a machine as an animal ratifies this further. His clothing is purpose-built to maximise his capacity for mechanical work, his excreta turned into defensive weaponry, his blood turned into both life-saving magic potion and the means of vanquishing supernatural enemies. Where Sam is a vital cog, he’s being made into as efficient a cog as he can be by the game’s acquisitional systems, just as one would look to hone a machine’s design over multiple trials. I couldn’t fail to notice that the more influence the human players assert on the world, the more mechanical the act of traversal becomes. It’s a masterstroke, accidental or otherwise. Once you have vehicles and roads to speed you through troublesome areas, the minor jobs become almost humdrum milk runs and some vital value in the journey is diminished. This has to be intentional, right? A direct tension between the wild and the tamed and an entirely novel notion of consequence perhaps. This richness is simply all there. It’s coded into the game’s lore and its systome. Maybe it’s all that time spent walking that actively invites speculation about the world being traversed and the individual’s place in it, but there’s such a richness of thought invested in Death Stranding that it remains entirely fertile for such exploration, far from the confines of its traditionalist narrative arc. And I mean, there’s more shit to rake over in its obsession with biology and babies, alongside beaches and water. Pseuds are practically invited to riot here.

If Death Stranding proves anything, it’s that Kojima stands absolutely alone. The thematic leap by itself is impressive. Can you think of another auteur, who’s worked since the 80s, who can leap from career-defining tech-spy military fantasy to post-apocalypse societal-reconnection walking sim without skipping a beat, and keeping the game utterly personal to them? Me neither. It’s that chasmic leap to a completely fresh, completely novel concept that I find almost breathtaking. So many of the most respected elders in contemporary videogame design occupy clearly defined tramlines of sorts, rarely deviating from their templates and themes. Death Stranding is such a different concept to Metal Gear Solid, even if there are curious and beguiling homologies between them, that looking at the interactive designs on paper you’d be hard pressed to say they were definitely from the same designer, unless you guess it’s Hideo Kojima. I believe you can never underestimate the textural richness of a Kojima game and Death Stranding seems more texturally-rich than any of his previous works, or any of its peers for that matter. But this is where Kojima has matured to, and where he excels. In an almost Lynchian manner, he seems to deliberately shock and disorient your ego in order to smuggle profundity and sublimity into the depths of your soul, leaving you permanently altered by the experience. The formal superstructures of incomprehensible narratives, arcane and complex world lore, abundance of cultural reference, are all there to rock your balance, with the real intellectual meat of the piece gliding in behind the wavefront. Metal Gear Solid’s manifold ruminations on the military, politics, technology and society, combat, honour, duty aren’t resonant because of the grandiose cutscenery and verbose expositions, but often via the potency of its imagary, implied relationships and logical extrapolations. Though in his formal assertions, Kojima has scored a few notable hits along the lines of portentous warnings that hallmark Good SciFi™, it seems that Death Stranding is less a warning and more comment and introspection.

If the Metal Gears are simple mechanisations of nuclear terror, then Death Stranding’s world is a simple geographication of a fractured global culture. Even though its accidentally prophetic chord struck so deafeningly with the COVID pandemic, that clearly was not the intent. Unless Kojima conspired to set off a pandemic to make his game look incredibly timely and relevant. No, it has to be about other things, but things contemporary to the post-Metal Gear Solid V malaise, be those his own desires to stop fighting and just work together, or looking outward to the Balkanisation of online spaces bred on magnifying difference. I tend to believe Kojima has no real idea himself; once again in a Lynchian mode, perhaps he understands that great art is merely shaped by conscious choice, and those choices are necessarily shaped by unconscious biases. But the wellspring of it all, like some giant black creature cacophonously crashing the surface tension of the mind, is the unconscious urge of the great idea to burst forth into expression. And that for it to really work, it must trick the conscious into allowing the unconscious minds of creator and patron to connect and communicate. In that sense, perhaps Death Stranding’s fundamental urge to join nodes together is as simple as it gets. It is merely the quanta and the mechanics of culture transposed into the grammar of the open-world interactive continuity, if you’ll allow me to declare a particularly extremist take with full pretention. Or maybe he’s just a charlatan, fucking around pretentiously when he should be making another Metal Gear. We’ll have to wait until 2030 to find that out, it seems. But for me, I can’t escape the sense that there is a great mind, doing great thinking in the Death Stranding landscape and that alone is a value we should absolutely treasure.

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