I try to go into games with an open mind, but I'll fully admit to you that I started playing Death Stranding with the expectation that I would hate everything about it. It was to my complete shock that I actually started to enjoy the gameplay and the world. You play a Sam, a postal delivery man in the post-apocalyptic world of America, delivering packages between the last bastions of society and trying to interlink them all to the same national network system. Delivering packages might sound dull, but I found it rather soothing to manually travel from one area to another, planning my route and trying to avoid the natural obstacles while the Low Roar soundtrack plays (even if the game had an annoying habit of only starting the music when I was about to reach my destination). Some have called it a walking simulator, and that's fair, but I found the scenery varied and challenging enough to keep my attention. You can craft items and structures in a Metal Gear Solid V sort of way, and some of those get synced to the worlds of other players. It's a bit of an odd system; while I like the feeling of working with the other porters of the world to accomplish our collective goals, it does make the game somewhat easier, as you can rely on the infrastructure other players have built to avoid the more challenging parts of your journey. The problem I have with this game is everything else, which really only serves to prevent me from delivering my packages. The scattered human enemies aren't worth fighting, and the interactions with the ghost-like "BTs" require you to stop what you're doing and complete a stealth section, or else risk damage and fighting a mini-boss. This game feels split in two; you have the regular postal delivery gameplay, but then the game remembers it's a video game and video games need boss sections, so they stop what you're doing, give you some guns, and make you shoot some enemies. Because you never use guns during regular gameplay, they can't make these sections hard, so they make them somewhat tedious instead. This is all in service of a plot which is just as nonsensical as I feared. At best you're dealing with mildly unique characters with their own personality quirks, but at worst you're having to listen to hours of cutscenes of Kojima pseudoscience and poorly explained concepts. This game has some of the worst world building I've ever seen, and there is no better example of it than the ending of the game, which I won't spoil, but requires you to sit through over two hours of technobabble cutscenes and just enough player interaction to be annoying. They play the entire credit sequence twice!! The villains of the game are incredibly weak, and just serve to exemplify how the overall plot is stopping me from delivering packages. The game is best when you are helping the local population with their problems, and it's its own insistence on being weird and unique that holds it back.

I absolutely adored this game start to finish. I know so many people undervalue this game and put it off as a "walking sim" which most of it absolutely is about just walking but I feel that's grossly underselling what this game offers. People are way too quick to label something as "bad" just because they don't like it. This game is far from a bad game. Playing this game and helping fellow players out whilst also being helped by them was one of the most amazing feelings I've felt during a game. It really reminds me of when you actually see a Useful note in the souls series except this time other players are DIRECTLY helping you. I'm so excited for the Sequel.

A relaxing experience all about the emergent gameplay of traversing a massive landscape and whether you're prepared for it or not. Best consumed in small chunks, and make sure you play it online - helping and being helped by other players is one of its biggest strengths.

For most of it, it was a 4* time, but the pacing goes really out of wack towards the back end of the game, with what feels like over half the spoken dialogue shoved into the last quarter. With how much dead time Death Stranding has (as far as audio), I feel like more could have been done to get to know the characters and story without the Kojima brand exposition dumps.

Death Stranding is truly one-of-a-kind, and I don’t think there’s any objection to that from either its fans or its critics. It’s a convoluted mess, but it does specific things better than any other game. Death Stranding is nigh untouchable when it drops the tempo and lets the player walk free through the exquisitely detailed geometry with songs from Low Roar and Silent Poets occupying the spaces between Sam’s footsteps. Its main weakness, however, is that it operates on the other side of the spectrum too much. Every menial detail is overexplained and is so rushed that none of it sticks–the worst part is that even if it did, it’s still all meaningless gibberish. Kojima had incredible ideas–this game truly is “Strand-Type,” the multiplayer aspect is definitely there, but it's drowned out by all the stuff that comes from having enough of an ego to claim you’ve made a whole new genre. I love this game, but can totally understand why many don’t.

For the record, Kojima’s definition of the “Strand-Type” genre is: A single-player game that connects its players tangentially through indirect interactions, as if by strands and not much more. It’s not a full-on multiplayer experience, but a concept like what Dark Souls has with its messages. And yes, that does make Dark Souls the first Strand-Type game--bravo, Miyazaki