One More Go

Death Stranding is a game that passed me by when it launched to mixed reception in 2019. As the first game released by Kojima Productions, the studio founded by Hideo Kojima following his turbulent departure from Konami (his previous long term employer), Death Stranding has always held the promise of his trademark weirdness, but it wasn’t until I began playing the game for myself earlier this year that I saw quite how unique an experience this game really is. I’ve played a decent chunk, maybe twenty-ish hours, not enough to finalise my thoughts, but enough to recognise that there is plenty here that sets Death Stranding apart from other open world games.

Death Stranding takes place in a fictional America following a cataclysmic event that has left the country divided and isolated. The role of your protagonist, Sam Bridges, is to travel from the Eastern edge of America to the Western edge visiting each city and reforging the UCA (United Cities of America). You’ll do this by shuttling all manner of cargo from one city to the next, building enough trust between outposts and depots to convince them to sign up. In essence you’re playing a delivery simulator, which granted, doesn’t sound all that exciting, but Death Stranding has plenty of novel twists packed in that makes it feel distinct from the pack.

The purpose of the open world in Death Stranding is to be traversed. Unlike in most games, the open world is the challenge that you as a player must overcome. You can’t just set a waypoint and walk in a straight direction, instead you’ll study maps and topography, plot routes and then make sure you have the equipment needed to reach your destination. To conquer rougher terrain you’ll need climbing ropes, ladders, bridges, and more, but also bear in mind that you’ll need to save space for the items and materials you’re actually expected to deliver. While you can load Sam up with an absurd number of items to carry, the more he has loaded, the harder it is to keep him balanced, and the more likely it is he’ll fall, damaging or losing the precious cargo he’s been charged with delivering. To prevent this Sam can quickly scan his surroundings, alerting you to rocky outcroppings, steep slopes, or fast flowing rivers, and as he begins to lose balance you can shift Sam’s weight left or right to counter any potential falls. This all culminates in a very deliberate movement system, something that most games minimise to the tilt of an analogue stick or the press of a button, but in Death Stranding each deliberate step adds weight to the world, making it more than just a backdrop.

In typical Kojima fashion there’s a blockbuster opening to Death Stranding, setting the state of the world and introducing you to lots of characters with silly names (looking at you Die-Hardman), but once you’re through those opening scenes, the pace of the game settles to a crawl. You’re left to soak in the moody atmosphere of the game, Low Roar playing in the background while you venture from outpost to outpost learning the basic mechanics and systems. Eventually you’re introduced to MULEs and BTs, the world’s human and supernatural enemies respectively. This early in the game there’s not much you can do about either and you’re best option is evasion. BTs in particular, semi-visible floating spectral humanoids, ratchet up the tension forcing you to carefully weave your way between them and adapt your pre-planned route on the fly. This section of the game does a fantastic job of setting the tone, but I think where it fails is that you’re not immediately pushed on into the wider world where you have more options. If you linger in the opening area for too long, you’ll likely lose interest, instead I would encourage anyone playing Death Stranding to rattle through to Chapter 3 at which point the real Death Stranding begins.

When you arrive in Lake Knot City at the beginning of Chapter 3, your options for navigating the world explode. In no time you’ll be crafting vehicles, rebuilding roads, constructing bridges and all manner of equipment and tools designed to help you travel further and more efficiently. It’s the promise of making life a little easier for Sam that’s been the real hook for me, building a highway between two major points will take a long time and a lot of materials, but being able to avoid rocky ground and waterfalls when making deliveries is well worth the investment. As in Kojima’s previous game, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, each tool you unlock is more weird and wacky than the last, ranging from cosmetic items to tools that will profoundly alter gameplay. The more deliveries you make, the more tools you unlock, and the more materials you’ll have to make the world a more manageable place, but you can’t do any of that until you’ve visited an outpost at least once, linking its surrounding region to the world’s chiral network. This makes your inital push out into the new frontier just as challenging as it always has been, with new areas and locations each providing unique challenges to overcome.

Once you link an outpost to the chiral network, Death Stranding’s asynchronous multiplayer comes into its own. In Death Standing you won’t ever see another player, but you will see their effect on the world in the form of constructions, lost cargo, and abandoned vehicles. Other players can contribute materials to your constructions, and you theirs. Large projects such as highways will often be a communal effort with players rewarded for working together. Players can leave signs for one another asking for help, or request where certain constructions should be built, but my favourite multiplayer feature is that you can see the paths other players have used to navigate the world, leaving a string of footprints in their wake. If enough players take those same paths, over time the world will be subtly altered, jagged rocks become smooth, and lush grass becomes a well trodden trail. Despite being a game that is ultimately quite lonely, Sam encounters very few characters in person, the world is full of interactions that connects you to other players.

Kojima and his writers couldn’t have known that the game was set to release six months before a global pandemic, but in retrospect the game and its themes seem weirdly prescient. The world of Death Stranding is in ruin, with divided cities and outposts reliant on the deliveries provided by its porters to keep everything running. Almost all communication is in the form of video calls or holograms, and any in person communication is at distance because of Sam’s nature. I’m enjoying my time with Death Stranding now, but I wonder if I would have felt differently playing closer to release when Sam’s interaction with the world around him would have more closely resembled my own. I wonder too whether the game would have been received differently had it released just a few months later, saving prospective players from countless video quizzes.

I’ve not yet finished Death Stranding, so I’m not sure how comfortable I am recommending it until I do, but what I have played has been fascinating, and the more I’ve played the more I’ve liked it, so hopefully that continues to the end, where I’ll try and loop back around with some extra thoughts. If you’re feeling adventurous, or are in the mood for something strange and different, you’ll struggle to find something much stranger than Death Stranding.