a million different things can be said about death stranding, it's probably one of the most thematically complex pieces of work done in this medium so far and reminds me of so many different films while also managing to be completely idiosyncratically kojima. it took me about a year and a half to fully complete this, one restart and over 80 total hours of gameplay. in the time it took me through various starts and stops, i managed to complete kojima's metal gear solid series and get more acquainted with him as a "auteur" before jumping back in to finish this. much like sons of liberty it's a game constantly playing with your notion of who kojima is as a creative, what games even really are as a medium, and what we should expect as players. it's also a game about the gig economy, covid (even though it came out in 2019), growing american (and world) division, fascism, terrorism, the military industrial complex, and the question of whether governments or communities keep us truly safe. it's also a game about love, fear, memory, faith, connection, separation, loss, grief, and hope. all this to say it's a game that's really impossible to actually pin down but constantly has me thinking about it and comparing things to it. through all it's messy gravitas and earnest guts spilling it becomes a unique and beautiful experience that while feeling indebted to cinema can only truly be captured in the interactive medium.

not to say that it's all a narrative or thematic project, the actual gameplay is simply invigorating in it's overall simplicity. as a courier, you are given starting points and destinations, but the route you take is entirely up to you. by utilizing equipment you slowly start to build your world outward, constantly changing the environments you inhabit to make paths and routes for sam to take. as more of the game opens up, you also get access to building roads and collaborating with online structures to access even more locations in less and less time. it's devilishly simple, climbing mechanics controlled by shoulders buttons, combat at it's best when you're simply avoiding it, but it iterates on the core design philosophhy of metal gear solid v (objectives given with no course of action specified) while de-emphasizing combat to create a game that just has an addictive gameplay loop that makes all the side objectives fun to complete. if this had been released simply as a courier simulator with none of the narrative interest, i'd probably still give it a very high rating based on that alone.

feels like possibly the current pinnacle of kojima's career, given so much freedom to create whatever he wants kojima decides to put out this messy sprawling epic that raises more questions and has even less answers than the best in the metal gear franchise. possibly a case for more "auteur" driven video games but more than that it's a case for giving actual budgets to teams that want to create things as audacious as this is, the only AAA game worth a damn.

as an ending aside, some of the films it reminded me of were: southland tales, the end of evangelion, the rebuild of evangelion series, david fincher's the killer, shyamalan's old, tenet, first cow, universal soldier: day of reckoning, cronenberg's crash, the resident evil films, the matrix films, cloud atlas, inland empire, twin peaks: the return, spielberg's AI, and so many others that i can't remember to just list here.