Uma experiência grandiosa.
Minha história com o jogo é, no mínimo, engraçada. Em um pequeno resumo: já havia tentado jogá-lo em outra oportunidade — apenas por 3 horas: e desisti. Praticamente dois anos depois retorno ao título.
Com 5 horas iniciais o jogo finalmente me intrigou — e não somente isto, me fez adorá-lo. Dito isto, é importante destacar o maior defeito dele: o roteiro é deplorável. Os personagens conversam de maneira vergonhosa. Não há elo a ser criado entre eles, ou até mesmo um vislumbre de desenvolvimento ou arco.
Passado isto: a jogabilidade é o ouro aqui. A maneira que o game design funciona, dea tal forma que define como o mundo como um personagem a parte — e obstáculo, é magistral. A história é bem interessante e os gráficos são lindos. Direção de arte impecável e trilha sonora de muito bom gosto.
Por fim, a sensação é de não querer deixar o jogo e a jornada de lado. Uma das poucas experiências que tive na vida, no sentido de se conectar com a jogabilidade.
Simplesmente maravilhoso.

Death Stranding é o tipo de jogo que todos deveriam tentar jogar. Digo tentar porque para alguns pode ser difícil engatar no jogo por ter um ritmo bem lento, com foco em momentos cinematográficos para aprofundar a história e em momentos de solidão e travessia meticulosa pelos terrenos de um EUA quebrado por um evento catastrófico.

Para algumas pessoas (pra mim foi um pouco no começo) o estilo de escrita do Kojima e as pirações dele podem ser uma barreira também. Estas que pra mim são o brilho do jogo e da pessoa criativa que o Kojima é. Em TUDO, literalmente TUDO, da pra ver que teve um cuidado e uma visão muito específica do que é a história e de como ela devia ser contada. Isso num mundo de Ubisoft e EA que mercantilizam a arte que é os videogames de uma forma totalmente desesperadora, é um alívio e um dos jogos que vamos olhar para traz e ver o impacto que teve na liberdade de criação e no desenvolvimento da forma de arte.

Saindo um pouco dessa divagação sobre a importância de DS, queria falar sobre a história. Esse jogo ter sido lançado antes da pandemia é simplesmente surreal pra mim. Ele explora grandes partes das ansiedades que cada um de nós teve durante a época (sobreviver, conexão humana, humanidade, extinção da espécie...) e coloca em sentidos filosóficos que mesmo após a COVID 19 são novas para mim, uma pessoa que por bem ou por mal gosta muito de pensar em qual o sentido do que a gente chama de humanidade hoje em dia.

Agora, no jogar é onde DS apresenta as suas imperfeições. Toda a parte de entrega e "walking simulator" é DE LONGE mas muito MESMO a melhor parte do jogo, simplesmente revolucionário. Mas no combate, especialmente corpo a corpo o jogo perde força demais... Algumas boss fights ficam até meio ruins justamente por esse motivo, enquanto alguns momentos e boss são tão bons que o combate meio travado fica em segundo plano.

Na minha opinião, esse é o melhor uso dos recursos online em um jogo que já joguei. Casa diretamente com a história e agrega MUITO a tudo o que se propõe.

Como toda obra prima, DS é imperfeito. E como toda obra prima DS revolucionou e revolucionará a arte para sempre.

Looking back at my thoughts on the original Death Stranding, I pretty much have the same things to say about this “Director’s Cut” iteration: I like delivering packages and I like the world, but man do I not care about the story and the cast here with the exception of Mad’s Solider Guy and Die-Hard Man.

Playing on the hardest difficulty, I found delivering was weirdly easy to handle but the mandatory war sections felt unbearable without additional planning beforehand.

Despite my hangups, I’m still excited for Death Stranding 2 and hope Kojima Productions leans even harder into the package weight management + daddy day care gameplay experience

After initially bouncing off this game in 2021, I saw parts of the announcement trailer for the sequel a few weeks ago that made me give this game another try. This time, I finished it. In hindsight, I should have focused less on building nearly every road there is and finishing most optional deliveries. The delivery type gameplay is fine, there are some aspects that I like, some that I do not (like the horrible feeling of the reverse trike that consistently refuses to brake properly and knows only full throttle or none in its boosted mode). By far the most intriguing part of the game for me is the story and world-building. Kojima and his team are very creative minds and sometimes I just laughed out loud because what was happening on screen was just so absurd. I do not regret finishing the game, I just should have done it faster. It feels like 65% of the story happen at the very end of the game though and I would have preferred if that story was paced across the game a bit better. I played the game from start to finish on the pre-selected difficulty "hard" and that felt good for most of the game, except for those boss-fights against a certain someone played by Mads Mikkelsen. These parts were quite the difficulty spikes. The music in-game is a nice collection of licensed songs that are sadly rarely used and when they do, I never got to listen to the end of a single song, as they would start 30 seconds before arriving at my destination or shortly before the traversal of a BT territory is necessary and entering such an area simply stops the music. There is no portable music player feature as well, you can only listen to the unlocked songs in the private room, which is a shame. All in all, I am happy that I am done now with the game and look forward to the sequel, but I am probably going to skip a lot of optional stuff in that game to get through it with better pacing.

Look, i know it took me FIVE years to finish!!!! but i loved this game. When I picked back up this most recent time, i was at the start of chapter 9. Up to this point I already had played about 60 hours. I love the way just moving feels in this game.

Playing it with so much time in between was interesting. As the last acts of the game have you walking to the very beginning of the game, it was awesome seeing all my old structures and my old path. Everything in this game is just so cool too. The character designs, the guns, the vehicles all of it goes so hard.

My only issue is the controls can be a bit obtuse sometimes, especially when it comes to combat. The story I know is an issue for some but I enjoyed all of it and appreciate it doesn't take itself seriously the whole time.

Can not wait for part 2.

well what do i do know :(
8,5/10 - Length
8,5/10 - Enjoyment
7,5/10 - Perfomance/Bugs
9,5/10 - Story/Experience
7,5/10 - Gameplay

Score = 8,3/10

Even if I were to say "I have no words for it", I would still write a ten-page essay on Death Stranding just talking about how crazy it is in the best way possible. But in short, I should just say I spent years just hearing things about it but never fully diving into what it truly is about. 5 years after the release and a shit ton amount of hearsay, here I am, realizing no amount of discussion I would be exposed to would prepare me for it.

Death Stranding is one of those games that push the boundaries of the medium and make you realize you could care about the craziest things in the world. Delivering cargo to assholes? Rebuilding highway roads with resources that require ungodly amounts of grinding? An unborn baby in a yellow pod? Hour-long cutscenes? A 60-year-old Japanese guy's dream ensemble cast playing characters with cool names and vastly engrossing backstories?

Yeah, Death Stranding has it all. And despite being a 50-hour long "Stabilize your cargo, and do it slowly but not that slow!" simulator, it finds a way to keep you interested at every turn. Whenever you think the game becomes stale, repetitive, or boring, it introduces a new mechanic or something to make your job easier, but not that easy.

The first half of the game is a bit too long. I think I spent 4/5 of my gameplay time in the first half and the last 10 hours in the second half. The story gets much more interesting and fast-paced in the second half with deliveries requiring less and less repetition. This is also accompanied by a few annoying stuff, like losing the entirety of your get-up every other hour, which makes you feel like the progress you made outside the story didn't help you much in the end. The story also relies on heavy parallels and reveals but they can be hard to track or underwhelming at times.

All this is still not enough to undermine the overall amazing experience. There aren't many games that make you feel like your journey was for a noble cause and you really did make a difference in the world. Death Stranding is certainly one of the lucky bunch. It just happens to be accompanied by uneven terrain and weird co-op.