The Progressive Beauty of Death Stranding
Five. Times.
That’s how many attempts I made to play Death Stranding.
Attempt One:
I pre-ordered it on Day One and got the special edition because I thought it looked interesting and I had disposable income back then. I played it for three hours, got bored with the walking-simulator gameplay, and went back to playing FIFA.
Attempt Two:
A few months later, I picked the game back up and loaded it from my last save, but I wasn’t sure what I was doing, fell off a big cliff trying to brute-force a climb, and broke the delivery.
I then had to restart from the last checkpoint at Capital Knot City; this irked me, so I turned it off again. I was then told by a friend ‘Yeah, the game gets good after 13–14 hours’, I looked at him like he was a crazy person and put the game at the bottom of my backlog in mild disgust.
Attempt Three:
Lockdown. I went on a spree of completing games — Mirrors Edge 1+2, Bulletstorm, the entire Uncharted series, etc. I then saw the now slightly dusty copy of Death Stranding on the shelf and thought why the hell not? I’m on a roll. I started it again from the beginning, played six hours and was so deeply bored with the initial opening chapters that it actually killed my momentum on completing games.
Attempt Four:
After someone on social media vouched for playing it with a podcast in the background, I thought why not? Maybe that’ll solve the problem I have with it.
It didn’t, I got the bike finally, and then it lost power in a river, leaving me needing to walk the rest of the way. Another three to four-hour attempt ended with no real progress made.
Attempt Five:
After years of stopping and starting…
Years of frustration and confusion…
Years of wondering what the hell Hideo Kojima meant by ‘strand gameplay’…
I finally got it.
I could write a standard review here of Death Stranding, but as a 7-year-old game that has already received a sequel, I’m not going to say anything that you haven’t heard a thousand times before.
You know that the boss fights are either just glorified shooting range simulators that offer little to no challenge and focus more on the spectacle, or you end up playing hide and seek with Mads Mikkelsen.
You know that, at times, the vehicle handling in this game makes you look at even the Mako from Mass Effect more fondly as you get stuck behind the fifth small boulder in a row while trying to wiggle up a hill.
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You know that the pacing in the earlier chapters is genuinely awful, and that’s probably why I bounced off the game so many times.
You know all that, so why should you play it?
Because the beauty of Death Stranding sneaks up on you slowly. It doesn’t hit you like a bolt of lightning, but rather sinks its hooks in you and quietly infects your bloodstream until you find yourself at the end of a six-hour play session, wondering where the time went.
The starting area is one big tutorial, trying to teach you the gameplay loop and the key concepts such as MULEs, BTs and Structure creation, which you’ll have to deal with throughout the game’s runtime. So, of course, to make sure you don’t miss any of this, DS1 basically puts you on rails.
And that’s where I think the abrasive reputation of Death Stranding comes from, and the statement that the game ‘doesn’t get good until 10 hours in’.
However, once you reach the shores of the second area and embark out of Lake Knot City, Death Stranding shifts from a walking simulator into a beautiful metaphor for human perseverance and co-operation; a game that wears its themes on its shoulder and weaves them seamlessly into the adventure.
For every new addition to the Chiral Network, new structures built by other players are added to the map, giving you ideas for how you can improve your journeys between each location.
One of my friends told me how much he enjoyed the zip-lines, creating an intricate network over the mountains in order to avoid the long and arduous climbs through the snow.
I got really fixated on rebuilding roads; loading up my truck with hundreds of materials and reconnecting distribution centres with cities, farms with isolated researchers.
I must have spent 10–12 hours at one point just methodically constructing the highways in an area the narrative had long since vacated, like some deranged Council employee. Maybe it was due to how painful I found traversing the rocky terrain that I felt compelled to make sure that no one else should have to do that under the guise of an infrastructural dark knight.
Because that’s the other thing about Death Stranding that really hooks you into what seems like occupational gameplay on the surface — the Social Strand System.
It starts out small. A ladder here and a rope there from other players, you probably don’t consciously notice it’s presence aside from the explanation the game gives you.
But after you start to add your own structures into the landscape and make a few more deliveries, you’re given your first true introduction into what the SSS can offer…
A small electronic noise, a like counter that begins to tick up and a small text notification: ‘A [Porter] used your structure’.
It’s negligible at the start, but as you begin to contribute more, you gain more and more likes.
What do the likes do, I hear you ask? Well, aside from giving you access to more structures created by nothing, absolutely nothing. They’re not currency or XP, more a badge of honour.
That’s why I spent so much time reconstructing roads, partly because of the ‘numbers go up’ mentality that keeps us all glued to social media (I am but a simple man with ADHD), but also every time I logged back on and I received a good chunk of likes, it meant I’d helped someone else.
The game’s through-line is that you are rebuilding America, but the online component means that you are not only restoring it for yourself, but for everyone else playing the game (to some extent, it would suck really bad if you loaded up the game after seven years and everything was just fine).
Because that’s the secret at the heart of Death Stranding, and I apologise to anyone that doesn’t have access to Wi-Fi, but then again, how are you reading this if you don’t? It’s a multiplayer game, an asynchronous one, as you never actually meet another player in person, but you’re all working together to get Sam to the end.
When trying (with some difficulty) to explain Death Stranding to a group of rabid gamers who were expecting the next Metal Gear Solid, Kojima said this to the BBC in 2019:
“Caring for each other is what makes people feel good. We’ve always been like that in the past. I want people to remember that and feel it in my game.”
That is such a beautiful way to explain what this game is at its core, a testament to empathy and humanity. And after the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown, I think a game that is about overcoming isolation and reconnecting with others also resonates with people so much more.
I think these themes are what made me keep coming back to it and kept it present in my mind despite my initial struggles with it; I could feel the heartbeat even if I couldn’t find the heart at first.
When I finally did, Death Stranding moved me in a way I don’t think any other game has and will manage to for a long time.
But that’s the trick about beautiful things, they don’t demand attention, they merely wait for you to realise in your own time that what you’re looking at is a piece of art.
Death Stranding is no different.
