Thoughts on Death Stranding
My first step outside my video game comfort zone this year wasn’t a turn based RPG. It was Death Stranding. I’ve been aware of Hideo Kojima as a game designer with a particular creative flair for a long time and always just figured that his story telling style wasn’t for me. Still, I was also curious about Death Stranding when it came out as such an odd swing for a AAA video game. It being successful enough to merit a sequel compounded that curiosity. The sequel’s release also resulted in the original going on deep discount so I decided it was time to sate that curiosity.
Turns out I was right. Hideo Kojima and I are on different storytelling wavelengths. I can appreciate the wild creativity of it. I can see why other people like it. And I like the overall theme it was aiming for. It just didn’t really work for me.
I was also disappointed by how conventional sections of it ended up being. It may be a game about a post apocalyptic delivery man reconnecting the world through the power of some kind of super internet. But you still have guns and fight bandits. There are still sections that are just a 3rd person shooter. And in the end it still comes down to rocket launcher fights with goo kaiju.
I never felt like I got a handle on the ghosts. The rain damages your packages and while there are a few places you can wait it out there are a quit a few areas that are always raining and the only advice to preserve your packages is to move quickly. But the rain is also full of invisible ghosts and if you move quickly you’re likely to run into them. You get some tools to deal with them but ghost rain never stopped being tedious. There are a lot of points later in the game where I couldn’t be bothered so I just rushed in, hit a ghost, and escaped the resulting goo / monster event which cleared the ghosts so I could return to retrieve my packages and continue my delivery.
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To me though, the most interesting result was how well the cooperative elements of the game worked in contrast with how I also felt like they undermined the core game loop. Your first trip to a location is always done on your own. You are blazing a fresh trail. Unconnected areas do not spawn in player structures and are limited in the tools you can deploy.
However, once you connect a location to the network structures and items from other players are imported into your world. Everything decays and it appears to be a random selection with a weighting towards more popular structures, so it isn’t everything that’s ever been built since launch. But it is still a substantial alteration to the landscape.
This is tied into the game’s theme of connection. The people who bring others together to work cooperatively are good and the people seeking to tear people apart are bad. This mechanic is an extension to that. Allowing players to help each other even if they never make direct contact. And it can be really nice when you’re struggling and find a structure or abandoned vehicle that helps you out.
That being said, I also felt like it undermined the core loop of making a delivery to a location and then building out infrastructure to make future deliveries easier. I could see a version of this game where I got caught up in the process or building bridges and roads and other infrastructure to make deliveries faster and safer. Instead, once I connected an area I occasionally found a gap or two to fill in but things felt largely filled out. The roads didn’t come with that, but they were designed to be built as a group so they required so many resources I couldn’t build more than a few with stockpiled resources and would have had to spend a long time grinding them from bandit camps. The result was that my engagement with the infrastructure mechanics felt minimal. A bridge here. A shelter there. It was fine but I could see a solo process being more engaging.
I didn’t come away hating Death Stranding. It was enough of a curiosity to be interesting even if it didn’t really work for me. It did things that were unique enough to stand out in my memory. Like making the player sit quietly for a real time few minutes while a character takes a break to be dead for a bit. And the gradual de-escalation of the big boss fight that starts with rocket launchers and goo kaiju and ends with two dudes waste deep in muck slapping each other.
If you’re curious about this game I wouldn’t warn you away from trying it. It didn’t work for me, but it did work for a lot of people and you might be one of those people. And if nothing else I can appreciate that something so odd got such a big budget and did well enough to warrant a sequel. It makes me more hopeful about a medium that often feels like its financial demands are choking its creativity.
