Death Stranding is the culmination of four years of anticipation and, for me, mild concern. Hideo Kojima was taken from the height of his career at Konami and the more-is-more excess of Metal Gear Solid V, and thrust in to an environment where he had - seemingly - far fewer resources at his disposal but not even the slightest hint of oversight. The years of development steadily revealed a director who was in no way financially constrained, and whose Hollywood aspirations seemed to be more heavily indulged than ever. Yet to actually sit down and play the end result is to meet a new kind of Hideo Kojima game, one that is markedly different in tone and style, which indulges his need to spell out every bit of world-building and research but which provides a structure where that content can actually be appreciated, one where gameplay expresses theme and cinematic flourishes are a garnish and a dessert rather than the core of the experience. This is perhaps the most Hideo Kojima game yet, but it is also one of his most creatively successful.
Death Stranding opens in media res in the style of the best science fiction, dropping the player in to conversations full of of unexplained but curiosity-piquing terminology that invite you to sit, listen, interpolate and reason out how the story world must work. It is, if anything, too mysterious - the player is thrust in to a mission of nation-spanning importance without a grasp of some of the more important character relationships that are supposed to motivate it - but it cultivates the mindful, steady, curious mindset that is the primary tone of the game, and it sets the you up for the explanations and background reading that will turn from a trickle to a steady flow as you progress.
The gameplay cultivates a similar sense of patient contemplation and constant observation. Sam Bridges’ movement in the game world is engagingly tactile but demands a steady and considered awareness of the terrain and his own current state. The left stick does not merely direct Sam across the landscape in the fluid, effort-free manner of the modern third-person adventure but very noticeably shifts his centre of balance. Run down-hill at a clip and you’ll feel his front-heaviness start to get away from you; ease back or even pull back on the stick and he’ll continue to descend at speed for a time but with his body more strongly centred over his scampering boots. Stride across widely spaced broken boulders and you will become conscious of the need to alternate left and right movement to balance out Sam’s inertia, lest he begin to pivot off in to a spiral and eventually crumple on to one side.
In time, this becomes second nature but never becomes automatic. The game doesn’t demand the constant, finicky persistence of a Bennett Foddy game, but nor can you simply set your eyes on the horizon. It’s the closest a game has come to the sensation of a good hike, your brain absorbed by the task of placing your feet while devising the best route across the terrain towards your ultimate goal in the distance. Even when the game gives you equipment and upgrades that make traversal easier, these are balanced such that you are using your focus in a different way, not abandoning it entirely. A rope may allow you to abseil down a precarious cliff-face and skip a lengthy walk, but the abseil itself - and any subsequent climb back up - needs care, lest you knock your backpack cargo on an overhang and send it plummeting to the ground below. Bionic legs that automatically assist your balance on rough terrain come with a dramatically reduced cargo-carrying capacity which will tempt you not to use them. Vehicles all come with jump buttons, not to greatly enhance their manoeuvrability but because of the absolute certainty you will wedge them, and their un-carryable tonnage of precious cargo, in between some boulders. (Their turning radii are even tuned so that you need to consider the best line to follow on paved highways.)
Movement itself is at the bedrock of the game’s hierarchy of goals. Your medium-term objective in Death Stranding is always a cargo delivery from one place to another, which must be completed according to certain conditions of volume of goods, speed, or cargo damage. Individual deliveries can then be manually threaded together, in the manner of Elite or any MMORPG fetch quest, in to an overall plan, which will boost your standing with multiple customers in an efficient manner. To play Death Stranding is to be conscious of the relationships between structures in space and the topography upon which they lie, and to exploit them to the best overall benefit.
This is game design and a tone which almost entirely reject conventional ideas of mastery and excellence. In Kojima’s other games, success depended upon acting with skill, speed, and excellence, but Death Stranding consistently rewards persistence, thoughtfulness, and planning, and denies you the opportunity to achieve a friction-free, graceful effortlessness. Even the game’s finale ranking system is grindable; Kojima simply does not care whether you reached your grade by doggedly completing a thousand shoddy deliveries or dramatically resolving one hundred excellent ones. A great Death Stranding player is not to be found weaving through the landscape like a death wind as in Metal Gear Solid V, but standing patiently in a river waiting for their stamina to rebuild, or contemplating the long way down a mountain rather than the swift, risky descent of a cliff face.
Which brings us to theme, and the first time in many years that Hideo Kojima has successfully communicated his game’s ideas through the gameplay itself. The core concept of connection is clearly expressed in the delivery-based gameplay, which as I’ve mentioned forces you to consider the spatial relationships between locations. The cargoes themselves tell stories about subtler connections: who might be sending which objects to who tells you about their collaboration, cooperation, and perhaps even attitudes. These connections are made concrete by your ability to build structures in the world, with each bridge or ladder or road speaking to the links between the previously-isolated denizens of the United Cities of America. These connections are in turn shared between the different players: structures and even misplaced cargo and vehicles from other players’ worlds will appear in your own, and vice versa, to be exploited, improved and recovered towards your now-shared goal of reconnecting America.
The game reinforces at every stage that you must collaborate to succeed. Structures are expensive, particularly in the early game, but by sharing with others you can create a better, less-frustrating and more survivable world. Hiking through the snow and rounding a hill to find another player has built a refuge for your cold, wet, hungry Sam is like spotting a warm cafe window on a cold and lonely evening. You will be rewarded for, and you can reward, this altruism: the sending kudos every time I come across a rope or ladder has conditioned me to smash the like button on every social network I use with a ubiquity and enthusiasm that I was sure had been washed away by cynicism. This may be the best and most positive argument yet that games have the capacity inherent in all art to influence people’s thoughts and behaviour.
Kojima’s newfound emphasis on thematic gameplay has not tempered his love of narrative exposition, but it does fit Death Stranding better than his previous, more action-oriented games. The opening couple of hours and the finale are exposition-heavy cut-scene-fests in a universe full of vaguely human ciphers with motivations that are relatable yet communicated entirely through exposition. (There’s some remarkable Hollywood talent here doing its best to sell it, but the scenes focused on each character are, enjoyably, completely incongruous with each other, like a low-key Spider-Verse treatment.) But for the bulk of the game, all eighty contemplative hours of it, the player is left largely to their own devices, with the scene-setting and research-regurgitation coming almost entirely in the form of text dumps. In Death Stranding, more than any Metal Gear Solid game, there is time to mentally unpack the ideas about human connections Kojima is lecturing you about, and a setting and goals that actively encourage you to consider the implications. As narrative fiction it’s unsubtle, with cloth-eared dialogue and a bias towards expressing its ideas verbatim rather than through the characters, relationships, or even much of the plot, but viewed as part of a game, and of this game, it actually works well.
There is actually an idea I’ve been toying with, since Tim Rogers made the case that Hideo Kojima writes non-fiction, that perhaps he is a creator of edutainment games: that the nearest analogue of something like Death Stranding or Metal Gear Solid 2 is not Stalker or The New York Trilogy, but Crystal Rainforest or Granny’s Garden, or I guess Where On Earth Is Carmen San Diego (we never had that here, but we got the TV show), a game where you’re given a great deal of non-fiction knowledge in an enjoyable, interactive environment. True, Death Stranding lacks quizzes to test you on your acquisition of the knowledge, but I think that’s probably the least important part of any edutainment game’s design. I made the joke recently that Hideo Kojima spent one hundred hours reading about the words, concepts, and objects related to the English word “hand”, and by golly he’s going to make you sit down and do the same thing, but I’m not sure it was entirely a joke, or that it’s particularly negative for the game to work this way. Perhaps Death Stranding is the world’s greatest multimedia educational experience. Perhaps Hideo Kojima should just start giving TED talks and get it all out of his system.
Death Stranding is entirely itself in a way only an indie game or a Hideo Kojima production can be, and was destined to be divisive. Its patient, mindful pace and resistance to streamlining are bound to frustrate those who approach games as sport, and its needlessly convoluted plot and casual disregard for narrative will turn off those expecting an interactive movie from the supposed master of the form. But the past few months of going for long, productive hikes in the mountains, surrounded by ghosts and rewarded by lectures about puzzling scientific curios, has been a genuine pleasure.
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