Death Stranding 1: Why is this a game?
I waited for a while to play it. A couple of months ago it was heavily discounted on Steam, so I finally got around to it. Despite what the title says, I didn't hate Death Stranding, but I didn't love it either. It was ok. I held off on it because I have never been a huge fan of japanese games. There is just something about the sense of humour over there I am not a fan of. I find it often very childish and sexual in a weird way. There is certainly some of that in this game, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. Trying to keep this spoiler free, but for example being able to make pee and poo granades and the very male gaze-y way women are portrayed was a bit cringe sometimes.
The much talked about delivery man game is certainly high production. It looks beautiful and it features a cast full of famous actors. The music is amazing, and some of the writing is pretty good and discusses some interesting ideas. I didn't find the gameplay elements of it very good. Which is why my question at the end was "OK, but why isn't this just a movie?*
I know the experience would have been very different if I played it right after it came out. The game is about a delivery man with a traumatic past who has to reconnect society in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event. Humanity is concentrated in settlements and a few loners in bunkers, but they are not connected. Your job is to connect all these sparse settlements, so humanity can have another go at society while avoiding bandits, terrorists and the ghosts of dead people searching to connect with the living. Playing this in the months after it came out as society shut down in fear of the pandemic must have been an intense experience. Playing it in 2026, when covid is barely a vague memory didn't hit as hard.
Part of the problem for me is that the game really lays it on thick. You are constantly non-stop being told by the NPCs that you are connecting a disconnected world and how profound it is. It lessens the impact of the themes when you are constantly being described the themes and having them shoved in your face. To lay it on extra thick, the MC is afraid of physical touch, which is really on the nose.
You carry out your job by carrying packages people need from A to B. Navigating the open world is dangerous. There are bandits addicted to stealing cargo, terrorists who want the world to burn, dead people still stuck roaming the world and the rain. Rain accelerates time and makes everyone it touches older rapidly. In that world, delivery people, mostly ignored in our world, are suddenly heroes. Literally life savers. This is literally what you do. You deliver stuff from A to B, navigating all these dangers along the way, in addition to uneven terrain and the logistics of having to physically carry it all. Along the way you also carry BB (Bridge Baby). These babies can see the ghosts of the dead floating around, and notify them. If you fall over or get into a lot of danger, BB starts crying and might go into shock if it goes too far. This is an interesting, if sometimes annoying mechanic. The constant loud baby crying got old fast.
There is a progression system to it, so that as you go and connect more places, you gain new gear and also vehicles. This will allow you to carry more stuff easier. There is also a collaborative element to it. Online players who played through what you played might put down a rope to climp down, a ladder that allows you to cross a river, or maybe even put resources into constructing a road that makes travel much easier. You can contribute to this too. Whether this is a cool addition to the themes of collaboration and society, or breaks the immersion when crossing a ladder put down by SkibidiBiden69 with an anime profile pic? This might be subjective and I lean towards the latter.
The gameplay is reliant on immersion and loving the journey. If the player ever becomes aware that they're actually just walking back and forth between A and B, the magic is lost. There is undeniably a satisfaction that comes with completing a long and ardous trip to finally make the delivery, however the game didn't succeed in creating a lot of those experiences for me, and there was instead a certain amount of tedium to going back and forth over the same route over and over. There is certainly a type of gamer/completionist that would get a kick out of completing all the optional objectives, all the additional contracts, reconstructing all the roads, etc. It just wasn't me. I was more driven by the story, so I left regions before they were fully completed. There are a lot of combat scenarios, but the combat in this game is extremely simple. Shoot and punch. There is very little to it.
The map is big, but not huge. This was actually somewhat of a problem for me. The game starts on the east coast of the US, and your end destionation is all the way in the west of the US. In no way did I actually believe that. The game completely fails in creating a sense of scale that makes the player believe they are traversing the entire American continent. You can travel from one end of the map to the other in like 20 mins.
The story has a lot of elements to it. A lot of themes and ideas. Through the game, Hideo Kojima is constantly parading a whole row of Hollywood blockbuster actors out in front of you. To the point that they are actually introduced with "Mads Mikkelsen as...". The star value of the actors feels more important than the actual actors they are portraying. Especially as the realistic art style makes them way more than voice actors. This was the first time I thought that this should just be a movie. The story is interesting, but most of the story is backloaded into massive amounts of cutscenes at the end of the game. It is hard to describe how poor this makes the pacing of the game. When almost the entire story of the game is left in massive cutscenes at the very end of a game, I again thought:
OK, but this should have been a movie.