Death Stranding (2019) is Kojima's Finest Work, Yet
[Note to the reader: this review is mostly SPOILER-FREE; I wouldn’t want to ruin this masterpiece for any interested parties!]
Yoji Shinkawa’s concept art for the game’s primary characters.
Before any concrete details came to surface, Death Stranding’s initial E3 debut raised more questions about game director Hideo Kojima’s future than answers.
What was he making? What genre does the game fall into? Why is nude Norman Reedus portrayed crying on a beach, as he holds a baby attached to himself via a ghostly black umbilical chord? What the hell are those floating guys in the distance doing? Why does nothing in this trailer make sense?!
It was all so mysterious, then. And when the first gameplay trailer showed up, and people were greeted to what seemed to be an elaborate delivery game, the outrage and doubt began to take hold. Is Kojima washed up without Metal Gear and Konami? Is he insane? Will he… deliver? (Hehehe….)
Now that the game’s released, people have either praised it wholeheartedly or slammed it into the ground with hate. Indeed, Death Stranding is a polarizing game, one few people truly understand, and even fewer, at least in the U.S, are willing to take a chance on.
Hey! If you have the time, I highly recommend reading Adrian Chen’s article on Hideo Kojima’s history until now. Mr. Chen did an outstanding job masterfully explaining Kojima’s works to the layman, and gives and honest, respectful overview of why people see Kojima as they do.
What’s Death Stranding Like?
Death Stranding doesn’t quite fit into one category of game. On one hand, you can call it a third-person “action” game (whatever that means these days), but on the other hand, your goals in its gameplay are more akin to something like American Truck Simulator. Kojima has touted it as falling within its own genre, the “strand” genre. You’re basically the ultimate postman of a surreal post-apocalypse scenario, in a world where the dead and the living co-exist.
Yes, you can climb that mountain. Just be sure to bring plenty of supplies, and take it easy.
Despite being set in America, the environments themselves are heavily inspired by Iceland, with basalt columns and lava rocks littering the landscape. The game itself is centered around traversal, be it on foot, via zip-lines, or good old-fashioned trucks on the road. Unlike most games, however, traversal is not as simple as holding up on the left stick; it is a much more involved process, enough so that movement is the puzzle in an odd, yet satisfyingly unique way.
Though there are map markers, they generally won’t be in your face, and since the shortest path from point A to B is generally not a straight line, unlike in the vast majority of open-world games, you’re incentivized to chart your own paths across Icelandic America, with the indirect help of other players.
This is a single-player game, but the element of innovation here is that when connected to the internet, you can see structures and objects placed by other players in your own game. If you’re headed somewhere, chances are someone else has already traveled the path you’ve set yourself on, and any ropes, ladders, or bridges (among many other things) they set down will be there for people who follow in their footsteps. This means you, too, can help your fellow man with a few well-placed items, and you can even build post-boxes to share loot and deliver each-other’s packages. The “strand” system itself takes heavy influence from the soapstone mechanic of Dark Souls, where you could read warnings and tips placed in the game world by other players; Death Stranding just takes this idea to another level, and basically created a game around that concept.
Above, Sam overlooks the distant terrain. There is no day-night cycle in Death Stranding; the sky is always grey, but the world never gets too dark (until it rains).
For the vast majority of the game, your job is to take packages of varying size, weight, and fragility to and from different parts of the open world. This is a delivery game on steroids, and I cannot stress this fact enough. If you are turned off by large stretches of walking or driving, you will hate Death Stranding, and should avoid it with a ten-foot pole; don’t go in expecting a non-stop action experience. If you don’t mind traveling around a lot, and you came for Hideo Kojima’s cinematography, world building, and over the top storytelling, as you’d be familiar with if you’ve played any of his previous entries in the Metal Gear series, you’ll probably like Death Stranding very much, as I have.
Since the game’s overall experience hinges extremely heavily on its story, I will not get into detailing it for fear of spoiling it. Just understand that it is very much the centerpiece of the game, and for the bulk of it, you won’t understand much about what is going on. More and more elements begin to make sense the further you go, however, and it’s a wild ride that’s highly unpredictable and very well-crafted. As a fan of Kojima’s previous experiences, I was far from disappointed, and I’ll go so far as to say Death Stranding to be his finest work yet.
Fragile, leader of the Fragile Express Company, is one of your biggest allies on your journey.
Without being able to say much about the story, I will mention that reading about it does not do it justice, and watching a summary or playthrough on YouTube defeats the purpose of the experience. If this is you, and you claim the game sucks, your diluted perception of it is the problem, not the game. I went in BLIND, so everything that I felt was my own. I trusted Kojima to deliver an experience worthy of critical acclaim, and I didn’t watch a single slice of gameplay throughout hype season (I didn’t even know it was a delivery game; I didn’t want to know). I wanted to feel Death Stranding, not watch it from the sideline, and damn, was that the right decision.
Why Do So Many People Hate It?
Death Stranding has some of the best character movement and procedural animation I’ve every had the pleasure of playing with. Dealing with Sam (the protagonist portrayed by actor Norman Reedus) and his balance is a huge element of the gameplay. When you’re traveling light, he’s an extremely nimble porter that can use stealth and speed to his advantage in combat and traversal through tough terrain. When he’s fully loaded, he handles like a big-rig, and even the slightest stray rock in his way is enough to send him tumbling down.
The problem I’ve seen with most reviewers’ approach to this game is that…
A) They most certainly did not finish the game, as is evidenced by their general complaints about the lack of approaches to its gameplay, and…
B) They lack some common sense, approaching this game as just another game.
You see, if you’ve been used to playing just about any other title in the open world space, you’re probably familiar with how easy it is to scale mountains and weird geometry through simply mashing your jump button and slamming your left stick into the wall. In Death Stranding, you will be actively punished for attempting this, as you will for sprinting downhill, trying to shimmy across the tiniest of ledges like a rock-climbing goat, throwing yourself into a deep fast-moving stream of water, or stacking boxes in your backpack until your backpack’s contents are twice as tall as yourself.
You can use ladders to go both climb steep terrain and cross ravines, provided you place them well and keep your balance steady.
Would you do any of the above in real life? Why would you expect it to work well in a game as detailed as this? Death Stranding is one of few titles that seriously rewards patient approaches to missions, not unlike how the Metal Gear games rewarded slowly making your way through them via stealth.
Death Stranding becomes way more fun once you realize that with a tangible inventory, it’s much easier to get around if you take two trips every once in a while, and leave the junk you don’t need behind. It was hard for me to get over my hoarding habits developed by playing loot-heavy RPG’s and the like, but once I did, I could stop worrying about falling over and start enjoying myself, taking in the beautiful scenery and atmosphere Kojima Productions have labored over for the last four years.
That said, the above, alone, is only part of the reason many people didn’t enjoy the experience. It is a slow, methodical game requiring much patience to get through. It is not designed for children, and its niche, borderline indie nature doesn’t lend itself to mass-appeal. It is very deliberate in what it tries to do, and it executes what it wants to do extremely well.
The Little Things
The game does many minor elements so right, you wonder why some of its simpler parts had not been tried before. Mapping your left and right hands to the triggers is one such thing that’s seems insignificant on the surface, but to me did wonders in the immersion department. If I was leaning too much to the right, I’d hold the left trigger to grab the left side of my backpack in order to balance myself out. If I wanted to pick up cargo, I’d approach the desired package, hold a trigger, then leave my finger on it to keep my grip tight. As my finger got a little tired in real life, so would Sam’s arm in holding the luggage, enough so that I would take short brakes, then switch “arms.” If I wanted to throw the cargo in my right hand at a hostile, I’d hold the right trigger to pick it up, press square to swing my arm, then release the trigger at the peak of the swing to in turn throw the box. The unique control scheme was elegantly simple overall, and was an unexpected highlight of my experience. I know that, alone, would be considered “tedium” in the eyes of many, but to me, it was awesome!
Lava rocks are a very prominent part of the landscape. Though cool to look at, their awkward structure means driving vehicles through them is ill-advised.
Speaking of awesome, the gunplay was another unexpected highlight for me. Many people considered it floaty and unintuitive, but when you stop and think, “Hey, Sam Bridges is a blue collar worker, not a Navy Seal,” you start to understand the painfully obvious reason why he initially sucks at using firearms: he’s never really fired a gun before. It feels like you’re fighting with your own aim, struggling to keep recoil under control, for the first half of the game, but by the end, Sam becomes comfortable enough to fire head-shots from cover with ease.
Interestingly, lethal combat is actually highly discouraged through various game mechanics, as was the case in previous Kojima games. Killing someone means you’ll need to haul their body-bag across the map, back to one of the game’s two incinerators for cremation, as leaving a corpse to “necro” will cause it to turn into a BT, a “Beached Thing.”
The Beach is basically Death Stranding’s version of purgatory for the dead, and Beached Things are the creatures and lost souls that managed to make their way from The Beach to the land of the living. They are one of the main enemy types you’ll need to deal with, and their toughness means stealth is also highly encouraged, as opposed to going in gung-ho. They culminate around specific locations on the map, so deciding whether to cut the map or travel around them is a decision you’ll need to make often, depending on time concerns for your deliveries.
Above, Sam is depicted readying a “Bola Gun” for fire against a MULE. The Bola Gun is your first non-lethal ranged weapon, and it will tie up a hostile unit for a short period of time.
It takes a really long time to get your first gun, so long, in fact, that many reviewers didn’t even know there were guns to shoot. Your first firearms are lethal to those on the other end, which means you probably won’t make them your first means of engagement (unless you like hauling bodies everywhere), so instead, more interesting tactics are also more appealing. I really had a hard time at the start of the game (I played on Hard Difficulty my first run through, which was thankfully a balanced, fair experience), because the only fighting I understood how to perform was punching enemies.
However, once I started to think out my approaches to clearing MULE camps, I had a blast sneaking through tall grass to first bind the enemy scouts with paracord from behind, following up by throwing smoke grenades to blind onlookers and cover my approach. I would then sprint at the guys, who were still coughing from the haze, headfirst with a box of metals to slam them in the face with. If they tried to fight me two on one, I would unload some cargo from my backpack to throw at the furthest one, stunning them for a moment, using the window of opportunity to parry the other’s weapon with my strand of rope and hogtie them from behind.
Seriously, I had major fun with the combat, as sparse and sometimes ridiculous as it was.
Depth Through Detail
Most of my entertainment with the game was probably thanks to the effort put into its procedural (contextual) animation. When I traveled around on foot, I really felt like I was there, paying attention to the ground to prevent tripping over rough terrain, and I found myself picking scenic routes over straight-line paths to avoid getting wet or having to scale steep hills and cliffs. Seriously, I don’t remember ever tripping over in a game, and you’d think that would’ve been a thing by now.
Making the movement so involved made me forget it was a game, as in real life I find myself doing the same things whenever I strayed from the path in nature. If there were bumps in the dirt, Sam would perform a subtle left-to-right hop, placing his feet on the ground’s slightest stumps, and when going uphill against steep terrain, he would use his hands to assist balance in the climb, instead of simply walking forward unrealistically like in most games. If Sam was strolling through a crowded camp interior, he would slow down slightly and take a look around, and if he heard something unusual while out in the open, he’d look over his shoulder and keep his head on a swivel. All of these little details by themselves don’t mean much to someone simply watching the game, but to the player, they combined to seriously aid immersion in a way I haven’t experienced in a game before.
The War Veteran and his crew are the best equipped enemies in the game, and will hunt you down during a few of the more difficult story sequences.
With the way the game’s progression is handled, you can also miss out on some of the best equipment it has to offer if you’re rushing through everything (I love when you can miss items and mechanics on a first playthrough; it shows depth). Again, patience is key; even after going slow for most of my run, I found things after I finished the story that would’ve been of major help, had I supported the more interesting and harder to reach preppers littered across the map. There were weapons like fully-modified and sound-suppressed firearms, to exoskeletons that were more power and space efficient, to floating, friction-less sleds that could be loaded with cargo and attached to your suit via rope. These were all nice touches that make me want to complete another playthrough eventually, using different strategies to transport cargo.
Speaking of transporting strategies, you do receive mission grades whenever you complete a delivery. The faster you go and the less you damage the cargo in question determines your score, alongside the obvious quantity of loot your moving. If you’re feeling confident about any one delivery, you can mark it as a “premium order,” which puts heavier restrictions on the time you have and how much you can damage the loot. You’ll be rewarded with a larger chunk of “likes,” which is the game’s reputation/score system. As you earn more likes from a prepper or distribution center manager, the more resources they’ll allow you to use and the more upgrades/blueprints they’ll give you. Each distribution center has their own material reserves, so you’ll be better off if you can convince more preppers to join your team as you try to reconnect the United Cities of America.
Cargo containers also have a durability gauge that’s separate from their contents. For example, you could have a metal box containing wine glasses inside, and if you toss it, guess what? The container survives, the glass dies. Who knew? It’s a simple mechanic that does wonders for the gameplay.
Higgs, one of Death Stranding’s antagonists, is one of my favorite characters, mostly thanks to Troy Baker’s excellent performance.
Beware The Dead
The main offender of container damage will not be drops; rather, it will be “timefall,” which comes in the form of rain. The rain itself in Death Stranding will instantly age (and eventually kill) whatever it comes into contact with.
Thankfully, Sam’s rain-coat prevents him from ever having to worry about his own safety when it comes to timefall, though that doesn’t stop his containers from taking rain-damage when left uncovered. The more wet they get, the more they’ll rust, and frail containers means taking any form of damage will ruin the cargo they hold that much faster. Containers can be repaired, but their contents cannot be restored, so it’s your job to make sure you keep your boxes in ship-shape.
Timefall also indicates the presence of BT’s. Rainbows basically indicate danger is near, funnily enough! BT’s are invisible to the naked eye, making them highly dangerous to ordinary folk, which is why most of Death Stranding’s inhabitants remain indoors for most of their life, in fear of causing a “voidout” for others to deal with.
Above, three “Snatchers” are depicted looming over Sam, as a voidout commences.
A voidout is basically a miniature nuclear explosion, caused when a “snatcher” (a giant BT) eats a living human being. The reason Sam chooses to go outside is because he is what people refer to as a “repatriate,” someone who, when killed, uses the “seam” (the underwater depths of The Beach) to return his soul to his body, effectively making him unkillable by traditional means.
Despite this, he is still technically a living being, and if killed by a BT, can cause a voidout, which will render a large section of the map untraversable, leaving a crater behind. It’s an interesting mechanic that made certain parts of the game slightly difficult for me, but it didn’t occur often enough for me to worry about it while I played. When it did happen, I thought it was cool, and before it took place for me the first time, I didn’t believe it was possible due to my thinking the developers couldn’t make it happen. I was delightfully surprised when it did.
I definitely wasn’t trying to make it happen! Honest! :-)
BT’s are hard to see, but the mist they give off while you have a working odradeck helps a ton.
Thankfully, the BT’s are not too smart, so stealth, as I mentioned earlier, works very well when you need to get through their territory. Your “BB” unit, a “Bridge Baby,” acts as your bridge to the world of the dead. They were created by removing unborn fetuses from still-mothers, and as such, are in-between the worlds of the living and the dead. Because of this, their pods can be connected to an “odradeck,” which is basically a BT scanner that lets you see BT’s if you stand still. Your odradeck also makes noise and points to the nearest BT in your area while you move around, among other things.
At the beginning of the game, you will have no way to fight BT’s off, so your BB is your biggest ally. Running away will be your only option if you get caught without a proper weapon to fight them with. I won’t spoil what happens when you do get caught, as the first few times it happened were pretty cool for me to witness going in blind.
Emotional Impact
Death Stranding’s storytelling is a roller-coaster of “feels.” There are some moments that are slightly cringe-worthy, and others that shine like a beaming star.
I didn’t care much for BB at the start of the game, but by the end, Little Lou was special.
I didn’t care much for the baby Sam takes into his custody right at the beginning of the game, but after all the events that transpire throughout the narrative, I couldn’t help but enjoy what became of their relationship.
Again, I don’t want to spoil what happens, but I will say that though its writing isn’t without flaws, the moments of its brilliance out-do the bad ten-fold.
Some people might think that the gameplay is merely a means to the cut-scenes, but in my book, the gameplay’s long stretches of isolation and solitude only served to enhance them. Without the gameplay, without the strife and journey it took to get from place to place… the cut-scenes just wouldn’t have been as special as they felt.
The real reason most of the story comes together is because its music selection was hand-picked excellently, and its songs only played when Kojima intended them to. Much of the game is mostly silent winds and the sounds of your own footsteps, so when the music does play, it feels special.
Characters will die, your friends and enemies will slowly become hard to differentiate, and the random introduction of critical details will throw a wrench in everything you think you’ve started to make sense of. Truly, Kojima did a great job in all regards. The ending to it all really made the story what it is, and when it all clicked for me, I couldn’t help but feel immensely fulfilled and satisfied.
Verdict
Story / Lore: [96 / 100] - Nothing is like Death Stranding in the slightest. Kojima has created a very intentional experience that must be felt, not explained. The narrative is the centerpiece of that experience, and I’ve left out its details so people can see it for themselves.
Gameplay: [92 / 100] - Featuring the finest 3rd-person traversal in all of gaming, Death Stranding makes getting around the puzzle and focus of its gameplay. Many who approach this title as “just another game” will be extremely frustrated to find common open-world tricks and tropes are punishable by humility.
Presentation: [92 / 100] - Menu sound effects are nailed, use of the soundtrack is excellent, and not once did I experience a crash or glitch in my 65 hour run. The inventory felt unintuitive at first, but once I learned of its many navigational shortcuts and tiny nuances, I found it very easy and quick to access.
Score: 94 / 100
Overall, the gameplay loop has a very simple premise; take contracts to transport cargo to new contacts, so you can take even more contracts and eventually reconnect all of America to the “Chiral Network,” an internet-like technology that moves not only data, but physical equipment and materials, too. The more people you manage to get on-board, the better chance humanity will have at surviving the “Death Stranding,” the name given to an “extinction event” that gave way to the BT’s arrival on Earth.
The loop is not for everyone, and if it doesn’t sound fun, then it’s probably not for you. The average time to complete the game is around 40 hours, though it personally took me about 65, and I still have many orders left unfinished. It’s a big game, and you’ll probably get your money’s worth at full price if you’re looking for a more casual game to enjoy. Death Stranding doesn’t require insane reflexes or great accuracy with guns to win; it does, however, require patience and an open mind to enjoy.
While this review may seem to not reveal very much in total, the gameplay element alone is very simple, though most of its depth is felt, not seen. Words do not do this game justice in the slightest (definitely not English, at least). The story is what makes it the game that it is, and the world and characters Kojima Productions has crafted within it is what makes it special. The casting was excellent, and not once did I feel anything was out of place. The experience was extremely bizarre, sure, but it spoke to me like no other game has. Truly, this is a game that must be felt, not explained. I know by saying this, many people will be turned off, but such is the way of its nature.
If you are not at all a fan of Kojima’s Metal Gear series, you will definitely not enjoy Death Stranding, and if you are seeking an easy to follow story backed by action-packed gameplay, you will be absolutely repelled by Death Stranding, without question. However, if you are willing to reserve judgement, take things slow, appreciate a game world designed with care and meticulous attention to detail, and have the patience to “slog-through” what many people will consider a boring, uninspired walking simulator, then you might just enjoy 2019’s late diamond in the rough.