Death Stranding: A game where you see dead people (using a foetus)
A review of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding: A Hideo Kojima Game
People say art is subjective. If you ask me, that’s a little reductive. The entire spectrum of human experience is subjective. And art is about the purest way to express slivers, slices and snippets of human experience.
Death Stranding skips the slivers, slices and snippets, and aims for an entire pie, and it chucks this pie straight at your face; a pie baked with unrelenting tedium, and iced generously with pointless, pretentious rambling.
This cake might already sound indigestible, but imagine you’re lactose intolerant, only it’s not dairy you can’t stand, it’s tactlessness.
If it feels like I’ve taken a metaphor too far, far beyond the point of utility, function or elegance, it’s only because I’m using this metaphor as a metaphor for Death Stranding.
Making something convoluted is not the same as giving it depth. Just like David Cage conflates misery with profundity, Hideo Kojima seems to have a tiny problem separating enlightened discourse from absurd nonsense. I draw the comparison because these two creators are supposedly (and at times, self-proclaimed) trailblazers in an otherwise stagnant industry.
It’s hard to examine Death Stranding isolated from the conceit of its creator. But it’s hard to examine Death Stranding at all, because it mostly defies examination, and often, explanation. I am truly glad that this weird, jumbled, incoherent mess got greenlit, but I can’t help but wonder how much of that had to do with the Kojima name. If more creators were afforded the same licence, the same freedom, this art form of video games that I love so much wouldn’t be the most risk-averse industry on the planet.
But the way it is, I can’t help but see it as elitist. And that saddens me. Execs should honestly let more people trip balls and make video games.
Much like the game, this introduction has gone on for far too long, and has added not a sliver of meaning to your life. But I at least have the decency to acknowledge that I’m wasting your time, and the courtesy to get on with my fucking point.
Death Standing
Anyone who has played a Hideo Kojima Game™ must know of his fabled love for movies, and will have, at some point, sat through at least one forty minute-long cutscene, wondering what on Earth was going on.
Death Stranding is what happens when you take this man, give him millions of dollars, and set him loose.
Over the course of the game, in the sum of time that you’re forced to stand around, inert, listening to holograms of characters talk at you, you could have very well played through an entire indie game, and it would have been for the better. Because you would’ve been playing something other than Death Stranding.
To be clear, I’m not even talking about the cutscenes. The entire game is literally just a series of accepting an order at one location, and delivering it to another. What I’m talking about is just the passive dialogue that you’re subjected to when you accept or deliver each one of these orders. And a rough estimate of the total number of these orders you need to take on? A metric shit-tonne.
So you’re already mostly just standing around, but add to that the sheer bullshit these characters spout, and for how long they prattle on — it’s ridiculous. What’s worse, is that I can’t recall a single instance, outside of cutscenes, where you interact with another actual character. It’s all just these floating full-body holograms, just getting on your nerves.
So, are the actual cutscenes any better? Well…no.
When it comes to cutscenes, there’s an inordinately lengthy one at the very start, then a handful throughout the game, each more grating than the last. But the worst insult to this injury is the end of the game. The ending cinematic, I’m moderately convinced is what inspired the length of The Irishman. The final cutscene is literally longer than a full feature film! It’s absurd!
But hey, you can pause cutscenes though, so I guess that’s something. Thanks, Kojima.
Death Branding
Drawing from my astute grasp of economics, I can confidently say that it takes money to make stuff. As counterintuitive as this might sound, developing a video game is not cheap. But there is a right way to handle sponsor product placement, and there’s a wrong way to handle sponsor product placement. Monster Energy Drinking Simulator: A Hideo Kojima Game handles this in a way that I will leave up to your imagination.
But there’s another kind of brand this game is trying to sell. The Kojima brand. And I can’t decide the peddling of which one is more insidious. I Have Movie and TV Star and Celebrity Friends: A Game by Hideo Kojima feels, in a striking number of places, like a man flexing his connections, and his pull, in an industry that’s increasingly starting to treat creators like rockstars.
When a man can respond to mostly valid criticism with something that effectively translates to, “American gamers don’t have the sensibilities to appreciate real art,” and have his statement go mostly unquestioned, that is when you question whether this man has maybe been indulged a little too much. Even if Sony Just Gave Me Millions of Dollars to Do Whatever the Fuck I Want, LOL: A Game By Hideo Kojima were the culmination of humankind’s artistic pursuit (which it’s not), does it really behove its creator to blather on about what a work of art it is?
An artist’s humility often elevates his art. But even false modesty has to be better than the pompous tripe we got from Kojima himself, leading up to the launch of the game, not to mention the bedrock of pompous tripe on which the game’s writing rests. So, going by the Humility Elevation Principle, this game is already abysmal. But boy, oh, boy does it get worse. Thanks, Kojima.
Death Understanding
In one way or another, stories have been a part of my identity, all my life. Some of my earliest memories are of my father making up bedtime stories for me, on the fly. He literally just said out loud the farthest fetched things that his mind could conceive. When I was a little older, I had my grandmother tell me the most bizarre tales from Hindu mythology. I have read some Neil Gaiman, I have watched the movies Sorry to Bother You and Annihilation, and I most recently played through Control extensively. What I’m trying to say is, I’m no stranger to weird shit.
But, with age, and experience, I have also learned to tell the difference between weird shit, and just shit.
I have never once encountered a story as incoherent, as pointless, or as asinine as the story of Death Stranding. The writing in it physically offended me in a way I never have been before.
If you think I’m being unduly harsh, I’ll just leave here a few examples of the writing in the game, and then never speak of it again.
- There is a character in the game, whose name is Fragile. And her catchphrase is: because I’m Fragile, but I’m not that fragile. And each time she says it, she somehow pronounces the word differently.
- There’s a point in the game where Fragile is standing over Troy Baker’s character, who is on the ground, beaten, when he looks up at her and says, “Honey, you ain’t nothing but damaged goods.” Fragile promptly socks him in the jaw, and hits him with the devastating, “You’re damaged goods.”
- Loading screen tips are famous for being useless. There’s one in this game that says: Delivering this cargo to its intended destination in good condition will make you very popular indeed.
- Here are some of the real names of real characters in this game (I am not making this up): Sam Porter Bridges (get it? Because they’re bridging a broken America by making deliveries!), Bridget Strand (GET IT?!), Deadman, Die-Hardman, Clifford Unger (like cliffhanger, are you getting any of this?), Mama, Fragile.
- You know how science fiction movies keep throwing around the word quantum and it gets annoying after three times? This game, for purposes I cannot divine, repeats the word chiral, roughly 900 times, and that’s not even close to an exaggeration.
- There is a part where you have to carry a woman on your back through a snowstorm, and she won’t stop talking to you. One of the first things she says is, “Hey, Sam, do you remember your own birth? Me, I remember being inside the womb. I wasn’t alone. I could hear my mother’s heartbeat. Hers and Lockne’s.”
As for the narrative itself, it’s remarkable that a game can dump an endless stream of exposition on players, make them sit through such criminally long cutscenes, and still make so little sense.
So, here’s the short version of it.
An event known simply as the Death Stranding wiped out a large chunk of life on the planet. It also fundamentally changed the world, blurring the lines between the living and the dead. This event has left America fractured, and in shambles. As Sam Porter Bridges, your reluctant goal is to deliver things further and further out west and bring each subsequent location into the fold of something called the chiral network. Connecting all parts of America this way is the first step towards rebuilding. For some reason.
Standing in Sam’s way are a mostly disorganised extremist group called the Homo Demens, led by Troy Baker’s character, Higgs, and supernatural hindrances called BTs. BT stands for Beached Thing, and a BT is a dead person who has not left this world, or rather, crossed back into the world of the living. BTs are invisible, because they exist on a different plane or some such horseshit. So, the two rules about BTs are, if a person dies, and their body is not incinerated within an arbitrary amount of time, they cause an explosion called a voidout, leave a crater, and become a BT. If a living human touches a BT, it again causes a voidout, because a BT is apparently the anti-matter to human matter.
But, oh, wait, BTs are invisible. Some people have different levels of a condition called DOOMS which allows them varying degrees of sensitivity to the world of the dead. It usually manifests as a “chiral allergy” which, it turns out, makes you cry when you’re around BTs, because of course it does.
Some people have the power of repatriation, which lets them find their way back to life, if they are ever killed.
Ever since the Death Stranding, people have also been able to access their own personal “beaches”, that are alternate universes? Some people can jump through these beaches, but you generally can’t access another person’s beach? But people can take you to their beaches if they want to? I have no idea. It’s all a bunch of incomprehensible nonsense.
Also since the Death Stranding, rainfall is now called timefall, and it ages anything it touches. Because, reasons. I wish it had touched me and killed me in the first five minutes. My first thought was, “Man, acid rain in the future is a bitch, huh?” But at the same time, the timefall made specific plants wither instantly, but the grass in general seemed to be fine? What was that about?
There are babies that are removed from wombs prematurely, and placed in pods that simulate the conditions of the wombs from which they were removed. These pods are also networked with the wombs themselves, for some reason. These are called BBs, or Bridge Babies. Hooking up a Bridge Baby to a scanner lets people with DOOMS see BTs, or something. For Sam, all this does is make vague shapes of the ghosts temporarily pulse in the air, and you have to literally tiptoe around them with a tower’s worth of shit loaded onto your back.
Are you with me so far? Great.
I’m going to discuss some spoilers now, so skip ahead if you don’t want spoilers.
Alright, the game starts with Bridget Strand, Sam’s mother, and the president of the United Cities of America (no, that’s not a typo) on her deathbed. She makes an earnest plea to Sam, to rebuild America. And she dies. She says, find Amelie. Her daughter. Sam’s sister. Amelie is basically just a younger version of Bridget. Amelie went west with an earlier expedition to rebuild America, and was captured by the terrorist group Homo Demens, and is being used by Troy Baker for nefarious purposes. Sam has to go find Amelie. He’s given a malfunctioning BB and he reluctantly sets off on his journey, chasing after his sister. In the middle somewhere, he’s suddenly transported to World War I, literally, and is running away from Mads Mikkelsen, who keeps chasing after him, creepily whispering, “BB…my BB!”
Sam’s like, “You can’t have my BB,” and shoots him.
Sometime later, you’re in World War II, and the exact same thing goes down.
Repeat once more with the Vietnam War for maximum impact.
So now, you’re convinced you’re on the run with Mads Mikkelsen’s baby, but having a ghost for a father is no life for a BB, so Sam keeps the baby. And names him Lou.
You find Amelie. Troy Baker becomes a giant monster, and has Amelie strapped to the monster’s chest. You defeat the monster to rescue her. But Amelie somehow withdraws to her beach? But wait a minute. Troy Baker might not be using Amelie to wreak havoc at all! It might be the other way around! Amelie is the villain! She’s an Extinction Entity, and has a primary biological drive to end all life. She’s the latest Extinction Entity in a long line of Extinction Entities that periodically wiped out life on a momentous scale, throughout history (think dinosaurs).
But wait! There’s more! It turns out, you were the BB all along! Mads Mikkelsen started the BB program back in the day, and you, Sam Porter Bridges, were his BB. And when Bridget Strand tried to force his hand, he tried to run away with you. In the ensuing confusion, you get shot, as a baby, and die. Bridget Strand takes you to her beach and somehow brings you back to life. That’s why you can repatriate. So, Bridget Strand is not really your mother. But also, Bridget Strand and Amelie are the same person. Amelie is just the beach version, and Bridget is the real world version. And Amelie’s body had problems in the real world, that’s why she died, but her beach version is fine and she wants to end all life, because that’s her primary goal, but she’s also still human, and making connections with other people made her question her directive, and she needs Sam’s help to overcome her destiny, but the process will kill her. But she is neither your mother, nor your sister, and Mads Mikkelsen is your father.
I…
It’s…
Are…
What the fuck?
</spoilers>
I’m sure I’ve missed out a hundred other details that are just as overwhelmingly painful. I’m finally starting to forget and rebuild my life, and sanity.
But, I have to say, there were so many times when I had to pause the game and laugh my lungs out, because a character said something so profoundly stupid. So I can’t, in good conscience, say that no entertainment was had. Thanks, Kojima!
Death Notwithstanding
These headings don’t really make sense anymore, but then, neither does the game.
Here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s just the writing and the pretension that make this a terrible game. I found it to be a consistently poorly designed game, and in general, so, god-damn-dull.
For starters, the interface of the game is a hot flaming mess. The font on the HUD is barely readable, and the whole thing is more cluttered than my Steam library (haha, backlog joke, I’m not crying, you are). Navigating the menus feels like being forced to drag your own fingernails across a chalkboard.
There are certain actions in the game that you need to perform over and over. And over. As if this repetition wasn’t hellish enough, the reward you receive for finishing these tasks is a series of recycled cutscenes and menus that you’ve already seen a thousand times, but still can’t skip all in one go.
Every time you choose to take a shower, you get the exact same animation of your character going through the motions. This plays out for a good minute or so. If you want to skip it, and understandably so, well, tough shit. Because you have to press Options -> D-Pad Right -> X at least three times to do it.
Whenever you complete an order, the game displays a slew of statistics, scoring you on a long list of performance metrics. You have to press X to continue as each individual stat is rated. There is an option to turn auto-skip on, by pressing R1, but if you’re delivering multiple packages at the same time (and you will need to, to minimise the exhausting tedium that is playing this game), auto-skip helpfully turns itself off after displaying the information for the first delivery. Delivering packages, being the primary (and only) task in the game, getting through these pages will have you pressing X and R1 roughly seven hundred times every ten minutes.
I’m not kidding when I say the first websites from the earliest days of the Internet will offer a more pleasant user experience.
For the people that think Death Stranding is a magnum opus, with a singular vision, I’m happy for you, that you were able to find enjoyment. I truly am. But even you should be indignant at how the game insults your intelligence, and how inconsiderate it is of your time. Thanks, Kojima.
Death Landing
The people that call Death Stranding a walking simulator have no idea what they’re talking about. Walking simulators don’t usually make me want to kill myself. If I had to break the gameplay of Death Stranding down to its component parts, I’d say there are three major segments.
- Watching cutscenes, with extra steps.
- Walking, with extra steps.
- Poorly designed stealth, with extra steps.
Get it? Extra steps? Because you have to walk so much in the game? Isn’t this such a smart review?
For a game to which walking is pivotal, it’s bafflingly the most frustrating action to perform. If you want to not fall over every three seconds, you’re better off constantly holding L2 + R2 as you walk, because god forbid the thing that you have to do for thirty odd hours be convenient. Use the right stick to look around with your camera while you’re walking, you tip over. Walk too fast, you tip over. Stop too suddenly, you tip over. Turn, you tip over. Walk in anything other than a straight line, straight forward, you tip over. Tip over one time too many, game over. All this is, of course, only when you’re carrying packages to be delivered. Which is only the entire game.
The packages themselves are delightfully frustrating to meticulously manage and arrange on your back. It won’t be too long until you can’t be bothered, just hit the auto-arrange button, and be on your stumbling way. How are all these steps making my walking game more fun?
Stealth in a video game is all about cues. Kojima should know this; he invented it. And I love stealth. I tried to play Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End stealthily, for crying out loud. So imagine my surprise when Death Stranding actively made me want to trigger combat encounters so I wouldn’t have to do the stealth bits. It’s just so many steps! Firstly, the enemies you’re supposed to avoid are invisible. You have to press a button to make vague outlines appear, and they too vanish in a second. Secondly, you have to press and hold the same button to hold your breath so these ghosts don’t catch wind of you. Thirdly, you still have to hold L2 + R2 to balance yourself and keep yourself from falling over. You also have to keep swinging the camera around to survey your surroundings, as you would do with any game. Once you’ve taken stock of all this, and carefully press on, the angry ghosts maybe won’t spot you. All this while, a breath meter runs out, and the baby you have strapped to your chest might start bawling.
All of this is happening on terrain that rivals the scales on a crocodile. I am actually not kidding when I say it’s possible to trip and fall in this game with nothing on your back, and with no obstacles in your way. You can stumble and fall to the ground for just walking. I guess it’s true to life in that way? My crime was to not hold down the trigger buttons for a hot minute, I suppose.
I realised I didn’t have to put up with this bullshit. So this became my routine: I would set my packages down when I neared a BT area, I’d then run straight into a BT, which would shortly slide me off nearby, and I would be facing a slick, black, oily creature, at which I would throw a couple of grenades. And that’s it. The fight would be over. And the area would be clear of BTs. I would retrieve my packages, and be on my way.
Except, aha, did you think this game would make things that easy? No. This game hates you, and wants to sap you of your will to stay alive. Once you’ve delivered your packages, every single time, the game will make you go back the exact same way, and the BTs will have respawned. Every. Single. Time.
But what of the human enemies? Well, I just punched them. I’m being serious. The only camp of human enemies with rifles that I encountered, I kept driving straight through, and I did not engage. Didn’t make a smidge of a difference. There is nothing to be gained from these camps anyway.
After completing every main mission (just reiterating that all missions are delivering packages), you are rewarded with a new tool. A tool that if you want to use, you have to physically carry on your back. But nonetheless, this means that you end up with a wide range of knick-knacks you can fabricate and use, if you choose to.
But for the entirety of the game, the only things I found of any use were:
- An exoskeleton that increases your carrying capacity
- Blood bags that are essential for ammunition effective against BTs
- Hematic grenades (basically bulbs of blood that you can chuck at ghosts)
- Trikes
For a game that makes a show of putting dozens of gadgets at your disposal, not a single one is the least bit helpful. There are 72 items in the game that you can fabricate! Just imagine. I only ever used 4, and even those, I only used to assuage the frustration the game artificially engenders.
Deterioration of things exposed to timefall was nothing more than a passing inconvenience. It wasn’t a strategic challenge to solve. Same goes for my gear wearing down. Pretty far into the game, when I unlocked it, the game told me that my map could now predict the weather, and warn me of timefall, so I can plan my routes better. I didn’t give a single stranded fuck. I kept doing whatever I wanted, and nothing changed anyway.
The only progression in the game is in the form of “likes” you receive for completing tasks or doing favours. I haven’t the foggiest idea what these likes do. They level you up and improve your abilities or something like that, but none of it made any kind of difference. I suppose this does work pretty well as a parable for social media; get all the likes, but nothing has changed, you’re still a piece of shit. Congratulations!
At any point in the game, you can press on the touchpad to call out into the empty world. Sometimes you get an answer back. I’m assuming the reply is another player calling out. But I just have one question. Why?
Which actually brings me to the supposedly visionary strand type gameplay of Death Stranding. What a bunch of crock. It’s asynchronous multiplayer. It has been around for ages. In Dark Souls, you can leave messages for other players, and you can see where other people died. This is the exact same thing. You can leave signs for other players, and granted, the system has a little more depth here, because you can also leave things like vehicles, and massive structures for other players. But it’s nothing new. At all. I never even bothered to learn what the signs stood for. I did sometimes use trikes left behind by other players, but I could have just as easily fabricated one for myself, just with extra cutscenes to skip and menus to navigate.
This “strand mechanic” is barely even a feature. The actions you perform in the game are still walking, driving, punching and shooting. Sound familiar? Except here, they’re all worse, and the narrative and experience are depressingly bad.
There is a fast travel system in the game. But it’s almost as pointless as the game itself, because you cannot carry any of your items with you when you fast travel. I understand the appeal of a game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Punishing, challenging. But damn, Death Stranding, you don’t have to actively despise me so much.
In the third act, after you’ve painfully walked through the literal entirety of America, the game forcibly makes you trudge all the way back. Except everything is shittier now. There are more ghosts. And ghost balloons. Thanks, Kojima.
Last Man Stranding
Perhaps Death Stranding was never going to sit well with me. If it had been just another game that had come out, my reaction would have been: lol, what a weird game. And then I would have moved on. But the pompous drivel in which the game is entrenched makes it something I cannot brook.
The whole game is one giant chore. It’s not contemplative. It’s not meditative. You know what is meditative? Meditation. If Death Stranding had been made by anyone other than Hideo Kojima, I guarantee that we wouldn’t have heard cock like, “this game is for the intellectually curious.” But it is what it is. And I hate it; I hate what it represents. Real art is earnest, and inclusive. Not pretentious and alienating.
Reading this, I imagine, is an experience similar to playing the game. You’re left wondering how something can be so pointless and so devoid of meaning, why it’s so long, and really unsure why the man who wrote it thinks he’s better than everyone else.
Perhaps the only lick of meaning I could ever derive from this game is that it left me feeling like I was stranded on the world’s most awful beach, wishing, praying that I was dead. Thanks, Kojima.
Get it? Because the game is called Death Stranding? What a clever review.
