Death Stranding Review: Bless This Mess

You can’t really talk about Death Stranding without first talking about the circumstances that brought it into existence. Back in 2014, Hideo Kojima—creator of the beloved Metal Gear Solid series, and one of the video game industry’s few true auteurs—was secretly developing a new installment in the survival-horror series Silent Hill. At the end of a truly terrifying game called P.T., which debuted for free on the PlayStation Network, players were shown a quick teaser for Silent Hills: A dream collaboration between Kojima, director Guillermo del Toro, and actor Norman Reedus, whose performance would be motion-captured for the game.

And then… well, something happened, though the details are still maddeningly murky. Silent Hills was canceled, P.T. was made unavailable, and Kojima split with longtime employer Konami, a once-legendary gaming company that has more recently shifted its focus toward cash-grab mobile games and pachinko machines. Kojima founded his own independent gaming company, clearly intent on making a video game without any creative or financial compromises.

Enter Death Stranding: an original passion project that, like Silent Hills, is also a collaboration between Kojima, del Toro, and Reedus. The game was originally revealed in a trailer so baffling that Death Stranding seemed to make less sense after you watched it.

Allow us, then, to demystify Death Stranding: It’s a game about walking around in the post-apocalypse with a bunch of packages strapped to your back. The player controls Sam Porter Bridges, a delivery guy played with gravelly gravitas by Reedus. (Death Stranding is, among other things, the triple-A video game adaptation of The Postman I never knew I always wanted.)

Even having completed Death Stranding, I’m not sure how trenchant Sam’s status is supposed to be. There’s a vaguely Orwellian, anti-capitalist edge to many of Death Stranding’s more eccentric flourishes—like the way Sam’s "name" is just his job and the company he works for, or the fact that he’s essentially a member of the gig economy who gets "paid" in social media likes (which Death Stranding treats as currency).

But the satirical possibility of Sam’s arc is soon undercut by the urgency of his bigger mission. Death Stranding is set in a near-future in which a mysterious event has bridged the gap between the living and the dead, which also led to the collapse of anything resembling human civilization. The aftereffects are both bizarre and terrifying: Fields full of ghosts that will drag you into pools of tar if they find you, or rainstorms that will immediately age anything their raindrops touch. Conventional lines of communication are down, and the few human survivors are mostly isolationists scraping by on their own.

Into this bleak dystopia (or prepper’s paradise) comes a pipe dream: a new United Cities of America, which Sam is recruited to help establish. His mission is to trek from survivor to survivor and convince them to join a network that will establish new lines of shared communication and resources. Some people are eager to join right away, and some people make him (you, really) jump through a bunch of hoops first. But the actual task, which makes up the bulk of Death Stranding’s actual gameplay, is straightforward: Start on the east coast of the United States, and walk west, using every resource at your disposal to brave the landscape and build a new country from the ground up. "Make America whole again," says every character, over and over again. (Death Stranding is many things, but it is not subtle.)

This is a Hideo Kojima game, so it’s not exactly shocking when this simple setup veers off into all kinds of crazy directions. Death Stranding is divided into chapters, and those chapters generally focus on a single supporting character. You’ll meet weirdos like Fragile (Lea Seydoux), Mama (Margaret Qualley), and Heartman (Nicolas Winding Refn) within the first few hours of the game, but you won’t get their stories until many hours later, when Death Stranding is good and ready to share them.

There’s also the mysterious Cliff (Mads Mikkelsen), delivering the game’s strongest performance, in a role I basically can’t tell you anything about here. And then there’s the character Sam spends the most time with by far: BB, a tiny baby in a small liquid tank, which Sam carries around because it can alert him to the presence of ghosts he otherwise can’t see. (Yes, there’s an in-game explanation for this, but please: Just go with it.) You’re repeatedly told that BB should be treated as a piece of equipment instead of a person. But the game also encourages you to bond with it; when something scary happens and BB cries, you literally rock the Playstation 4 controller back and forth, using the gentle motion to soothe it back to sleep. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be ride-or-die about keeping BB happy and safe after about two minutes.

Technologically, Death Stranding absolutely stuns, with terrific graphics and a seamless, silky-smooth performance—even if you have a standard PlayStation 4 instead of a Pro model. The motion-captured performances are the best I’ve ever seen in a video game, conveying each wrinkle and nuance of each actor’s work without ever dipping into the uncanny valley—a particularly impressive feat when you’re dealing with faces and voices as recognizable as Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen.

The story itself doesn’t really come into focus until the final 10 hours of the game, when the previously open-ended structure gives way to short bursts of action followed by lengthy cutscenes, which are beautifully directed and acted even when they don’t quite make sense. But most of my favorite bits from Death Stranding didn’t come out of the predetermined plot—they came out of the unpredictable nature of the game itself. Death Stranding is designed in such a way that you’re constantly making little decisions. Should you cut through a camp full of enemies, or take a longer, harder route over the mountains? Should you carry packages that will weigh you down, but will pay off if you can successfully deliver them? Should you load up on supplies that will make it easier to navigate, or keep yourself flexible enough to grab anything you find on the road? Even the act of walking requires a fair amount of focus, with a push of a trigger button required to shift Sam’s weight every time he takes a wrong step.

That might sound annoying—and at first, it is. But it quickly becomes absorbing, and it’s in those granular choices that I suspect many players will find their most memorable moments. Take one experience I had that many Death Stranding players will probably share: An exhausting, unpleasant trudge over a snow-covered mountain located somewhere around what used to be Colorado, which was so tall and imposing that it didn’t even seem possible to climb it. But what choice did I have? As my Sam trudged upward, hauling way too many packages, his energy meters were so depleted that I’d need to stop and rest every three or four steps. It quickly became a panic-inducing downward spiral; with my resources depleted, Sam became harder to control, which increased the risk that I’d stumble and fall back down the mountain I’d just spent so much effort to climb.

Still, with patience, and persistence, and a few curses muttered at my TV, I finally guided Sam to the peak of the mountain—and took in one of the game’s genuinely stunning vistas, which was so striking that I left an in-game signpost telling fellow players players they should come up this way for a great view. As I climbed down the other side of the mountain—slipping in the snow, boots so worn out I’d soon be barefoot—I came to a steep ledge, and was absurdly grateful to find a climbing rope another player had left for me to use, along with a little thumbs-up sign encouraging me to keep going.

This is one of many, many examples I encountered one of Death Stranding’s most compelling features: asymmetric support between the players and hundreds of others, playing the game simultaneously. Players leave each other helpful notes or resources, which will appear in other player’s games—something as simple as the climbing rope I encountered, or as complex as massive bridges spanning rivers or private rooms to refuel on a long journey. In return, players who benefit from those resources can reward the person who provided them with "likes." The game’s most elaborate project—a series of roads that would make travel faster and safer—will clearly require the collaboration of many players, embedding Death Stranding’s focus on the importance of connection and collaboration into the gameplay itself. And there’s something genuinely moving about those little connections, which really do serve as a kind of reminder that human beings are all in this together.

This is probably as good a time as any to catalogue some of Death Stranding’s flaws, which are plentiful. The first 10 or so hours are mostly a tedious slog, forcing players to deal with enemies and the environment without any of the tools that will eventually make Death Stranding manageable and dynamic. Early on, there were at least a few hours when I was convinced I hated this game, and I suspect many players will shrug and give up instead of pushing forward.

Even after that early hurdle, the game’s structure is oddly lopsided, with two extremely long chapters stuck near the start before the pace picks up for the second half. Much of the game’s story is explained in complicated, not-particularly-interesting paragraphs of exposition that are walled off in a submenu you can access when the game is paused. Both the combat and the stealth sequences are clunky enough that I sometimes wished Death Stranding would just lean into its strengths and give me a big, empty, landscape to explore. And there are distracting and gimmicky intrusions that completely break the verisimilitude, from in-game ads for Monster energy drink and the reality show Ride with Norman Reedus to a cameo from the Clueless Gamer himself, Conan O’Brien.

So yeah, it’s kind of a mess. But by the end of the game, I didn’t really care about any of those flaws. What was initially tedious about Death Stranding eventually felt meditative; what was initially ridiculous eventually felt riveting; what was initially ponderous eventually felt profound. This will not be a game for everyone, but man, did it turn out to be a game for me. Even at a (rushed) 42 hours, I hated to see the end of Death Stranding, and it’s been a long time since I’ve played anything that challenged or thrilled or moved me this much.

I could keep talking about everything I loved about Death Stranding—but most of that would be spoilers, and I’d rather let you experience those moments for yourself. And the rest would be too specific and personal to my experience to mean anything to anybody else. So I’ll just say this: I think Death Stranding is clunky, messy, strange, and wonderful. Its strengths are undeniably strong, and its imperfections are hand-crafted, not mass-produced. A game made by these people, with these ambitions, under these conditions was never going to be perfect. But it is something special.

Fans are already protesting.

What are a game's merits when its players are seen purely for profit?

The prequel from Bithell Games slows down the franchise’s action and gets tactical.

Originally Appeared on GQ