Death Stranding is a video game about a mailman in a post-apocalyptic and broken America where life and death are now one and the same. Sam Porter uses a baby in a bottle to navigate ghosts and time-altering rain in a quest to find his sister as he dodges terrorists and other mailmen who have become addicted to delivering packages. Porter is played by Norman Reedus, who does both the voice and motion capture for the character. You can make Reedus piss on demand (as long as there’s no NPCs around, then he’ll tell you to forget about it), as well as take a crap when in a safe room, which is censored by a giant ad for his AMC show Ride. You can also chug Monster Energy Drink on demand.
All of that sounds like the most made-up shit anyone could write, I know, but that’s Death Stranding in a nutshell. It’s also been one of the most anticipated video games of the last four years due to both a heavy marketing push from Sony and its association with gaming rockstar and legend Hideo Kojima.
The game was shrouded in mystery for years, being shown off with only vague cinematics highlighting the odd cast of actors Kojima had amassed from the amazing Mads Mikkelsen to Lindsey Wagner both in her current age to a deaged version who looks like she stepped right out of the 70s.
Death Stranding is a game that is either going to be one where you can sit back and appreciate the atmospheric escalation on a journey that gets increasingly intense or one of the most boring slogs you’ll have to endure as you go from story beat to story beat in the hopes they’ll be enough to get you through the tedious gameplay.
Anyone expecting a spiritual sequel to Metal Gear Solid will be disappointed. Though the game has stealth sections, they’re decidedly more one note than Kojima’s previous long-running series, and the sparse combat is surprisingly poor. There may be some trappings there, but this thing is a different beast altogether.
The story is something of a mess and, like a lot of Kojima’s previous work, it’s almost impossible to tell where the serious begins and absurd ends. While the narrative is presented in a sober way of humanity on the verge of collapse, you also take most of your orders early in the game from a man in a half skull mask named Die-Hardman, a woman named Mama and also a guy who is a bit too fascinated with your bodily functions called Heartman. Believe it or not, the whole thing actually comes together pretty cleanly in the end, even if there are some big unanswered questions for sequel bait.
What makes the game more than just a light survival simulator of a UPS delivery man besides the crazy story and world? Something called the Strand System and, much like the dueling absurdism and soberness, it’s a constant battle between connection and unbearable loneliness.
The Strand System is an evolution of the kind of asymmetrical multiplayer we’ve seen develop over the years in games like Dark Souls. You do something in your game that can carry over to someone else’s. Leaving a ladder to scale a mountain can show up in another player’s world, which they can like multiple times – similar to a Facebook post or tweet. If Reedus takes a piss on the ground, mushrooms buzzing with bugs you eat to increase stamina can spawn across games, bridges and roads can be built across worlds. It’s all modernized with social aspects where the more likes structures and items get, the more they spread like they do in current social media where the most viewed and loved things float to the top.
Hideo Kojima talked a lot about how Death Stranding was about connecting people but, much like social media, it’s hard to know where the connection begins, if it does.
Like most of the game, it takes a while for that aspect to build up but, once it does, it fills up pretty astonishingly as everyone’s world becomes more populated with all the many useful items to deliver packages. Despite knowing all this stuff carries over between games, there’s still no one there. No matter how many ladders, ropes and bridges come up, it’s all just phantoms. You’ll never see another Sam climbing down the mountains or leaving you all these little goodies or urinating out in the field.
Death Stranding is the lonely person’s idea of what it’s like to connect.
With Kojima’s lack of subtlety being one of his biggest calling cards (and one of the biggest criticisms that gets lobbied at him), it can almost feel accidental that something so subtle manages to weave itself into the game. This irony of connecting people by doing everything but actually putting them face to face is such a beautiful way to convey how social media has wrapped what ‘connection’ means. If we take Kojima at his word that Death Stranding is his way of trying to connect people, the game stands as a sort of surrender to human loneliness. One in which the closest you get to most people is likes on a Twitter or Facebook post.
Even the character Sam really connects with the most through the game, Lou, is a pseudo-stillborn baby who floats in a bottle that he can’t speak to or touch in a direct manner.
Death Stranding is a game that can be hard to talk about and describe. It is a one-of-a-kind game that could probably only be produced by a mind that truly understands the depths of loneliness. It may be hard to think of Kojima as a lonely man considering all the Twitter posts of him hanging out with his celebrity collaborators and he, as an adult, may not feel those same emotions anymore, but it’s not hard to imagine the odd world of Death Stranding as one that’s born for the desperate hope of reaching someone, anyone, that wants to play with it but also with an understanding that it can only be watched, understood and loved from afar and never truly face to face.