Death Stranding

I am so glad Death Stranding exists. It’s serenely beautiful and conceptually fascinating, while also being frequently tedious and at worst, completely laborious...An experience of visual wonder and quite incredible ideas; an impossible elevator pitch, somehow brought to fruition; something that you have to experience for yourself, just to see if you like it. All brought down by the underpinnings of a game isn’t refined enough in its core mechanics or coherent enough in its narrative delivery to justify the hubristic run-time.

Hideo Kojma's first post-Metal Gear game is a messy, indulgent vanity project - but also a true original. [Eurogamer Recommended]

Every inch of Death Stranding teems with meaning or implication. Even the stupidest and most pretentious developments build to create a multi-layered game, one with numerous potential points of attack to analyze. It is a story about fatherhood. It is a broad dig at the gig economy. It is deeply concerned with upcoming environmental disaster and American politics, old and new.

Death Stranding builds a complex and surreal world, and it's hard not to marvel at the way it all comes together.

Death Stranding feels like two games in one, designed for seemingly opposite audiences. One is a wholly unique open-world adventure with asynchronous cooperative multiplayer that allows me to feel like I’m part of a community, building a world from scratch. And the other is a long, confusing, deeply strange movie. The former is pulling most of the weight, but they share equal screen time. And, like a steamer trunk full of sperm, it’s impossible to separate the good from the bad. It’s all in the same box.

Death Stranding is a game that demands to be argued over and analyzed for years. It starts rough, and then gets better and better as it goes along, culminating in an ending that is both hugely important to its universe, and also very small and personal to Sam. It has big ideas for things it wants to say, and then it layers them in with heavy-handed messages about togetherness and bonding with your fellow man.

It's wonderful that Hideo Kojima gets to do whatever he wants to do. It's equally wonderful that I can do whatever I want to do, and what I did was stop playing his game...Death Stranding is a hassle. A slow, monotonous, fiddly, irritating hassle. It's pure indulgence, every whimsical fancy that crossed the studio's minds has been tossed in without regard for the player's time or the gameplay experience.

To fully embrace Death Stranding, you have to let go of that desire to know everything. Much like watching Lost or playing pretty much any JRPG, the overall narrative is just a means to an end. It’s a setup for creating dramatic, emotional moments. It’s not always easy to get to those moments, and you’ll have to suspend your disbelief quite often to fully enjoy them, but for a certain kind of player, that long, exhausting journey will be worth the effort.

I’ve never played anything like Death Stranding, and I doubt I ever will again. That alone is worth the $60 price tag.