GOTY 2019 - NUMBER ONE
Video version
I don’t use these GOTY projects to surprise anyone. I use them to discuss what makes me love these games so much. It’s now my duty to tell you how much I love Death Stranding.
Without wanting to get too personal or accusatory, in recent years, I’ve seen people become more doubtful of Kojima, and questioning whether they actually like him. Some have criticised his ego, his consideration for his audience and his sexual politics. You’re entitled to take issue with any of that. I love Hideo Kojima though. I admire his deep sincerity, his humour, his warmth, his ambition and his rich understanding of the potential of games. I love the guy who had us hatch an owl from an egg to convince a guard it was nighttime in Metal Gear 2. I love the guy who had us turn up the volume on our TVs to hear a timebomb in Snatcher, before loudly exploding it and having a character tell us off for making such a racket. I love the guy who consistently used one of the biggest franchises in games to spread messages about the horrors of nuclear weapons, the ugly history of war, and how tragic it would be to lose human civilisation to those things. I love Hideo Kojima, and Death Stranding is the most quintessentially Hideo Kojima thing to be released as a commercial product in decades.
For me, Kojima’s design has always been about constraints and limitations. It’s what elevates his work. Kojima started out with no ambition of becoming the influential game director he is today. He just wanted to work in a creative field. Metal Gear wasn’t some genius formula that Kojima came up with out of nowhere, but a pithy response to how hard it was to make action games on the MSX2. You couldn’t make a game where enemies and bullets flooded the screen, but you could make one about avoiding them. Constraints and limitations were what the player were faced with too. The harsh, angular walls shaping the rooms, pushing you to encounter guards and obstacles, and strategically responding to those limits to push through to success. They often push the player to rethink what the limitations are too. Why can’t the game’s packaging provide the solution to a puzzle? It’s liberating to discover that the game’s constraints extend beyond what’s presented on screen. That kind of thinking runs through Kojima’s games, and it’s what makes them so much more than moving an avatar from cutscene to cutscene.
This thinking is at the forefront in Death Stranding. If you want to enjoy it, it means learning to love the constraints. Planning your routes through dangerous, lonely wilderness. Ensuring you have everything you need, but not more than you can carry. Knowing when you can take a threat head-on, or if you’re better off avoiding it. You can talk about the silly acronyms and nonsense jargon as much as you like, but if you ask me, it’s this stuff that’s the meat and potatoes of Kojima’s action games.
Exploring Death Stranding’s stark, desolate hills and valleys, keeping myself aware of all the threats acting against me, was a real treat for me. I’ve never played an open world game where the shape of a landscape affected my approach so dramatically. Death Stranding’s topography is intended to feel wild and natural. It’s such a departure from Metal Gear Solid, where the level design was so precisely arranged that it was constructed from Lego before it was written into code. The brilliance is how it invites the players to conquer the most dangerous areas, design their own solutions to tame them, and share that with the online community. You’re exploring the world and figuring out how to survive in it, as a group, mutually benefiting each member. This is how humanity first thrived. This is why societies were established. This is connecting you to the potency of the game’s message directly through playing it.
As you make your way through the game, placing more tools and contributing to more group projects, you’ll reap the benefits of everything other players have done with the game. Cutting the pain out of traveling between outposts really makes you feel that society is coming together again. You appreciate it, and want to know how you can help those who helped you. You want to contribute in ways that benefit the most people you can. Kojima is trying to help players take on the issues that worry him, in the field where he has the most influence. He’s making his mark and asking us to do the same in our lives. It’s an incredible thing to do with a game, and the end result is elegantly built on the decades of experience he’s gained from games development. Death Stranding isn’t a statement on modern culture, but a message to it. It wants to help. How often do we talk about videogames like this? At this point, shouldn’t it be more?
Death Stranding carries a heavy burden – I know that’s something of a pun, but so many of the names and ideas in the game seem designed to force you into making them. Not only carrying the weight of being the first title from the new, independent Kojima Productions, pushing to bring themselves the recognition of a studio capable of Triple A work, but also the weight of the massively compromised version of The Phantom Pain that was released, and the cancellation of Silent Hills and Zone of the Enders 3. Casting Norman Reedus and Guillermo del Toro as main characters seemed to indicate that Kojima’s plans for those projects would be incorporated into Death Stranding, and there is some evidence for that in the final text. The story touches upon the circumstances that bring people into terrorism, child labor, the power of fear and monsters, and the ancient Egyptian understanding of death and the soul – things that were suggested to be key focuses of the Project Ogre version of MGSV, Silent Hills and ZOE3, respectively. For an ardent supporter of Kojima’s career, it’s cathartic to see something come out of the plans that were quashed by his previous employer. It underlines the fact that Kojima is going to make the kind of stuff he wasn’t allowed to at Konami.
Some of my favourite parts of the game are the text documents and the memory chips that document pieces of art or everyday tools. Things that really paint the picture of what it would mean if the world lost its connection to history, culture and science. It’s one thing to imagine a fractured society where people don’t communicate, but quite another to picture a future where we don’t know what Godzilla is, and how much it would mean to regain that knowledge. Death Stranding is at its best when it’s making me appreciate the historical impact of coffee cups. The wee things that make you really thankful for the work of strangers, and interested in subjects that you might have previously taken for granted. Kojima’s curiosity and appreciation for culture is all over Death Stranding, and it would take a bitterly jaded cynic to not find some value in what he’s saying.
I entirely understand why people don’t like Death Stranding, and I don’t think any less of them for that. It’s a game that’s willfully grueling and repetitive. It doesn’t fulfill a lot of the criteria that many would want from a game. The high-minded social commentary and dark science fiction concepts often clash hard against the videogamey characters and poop jokes. I don’t know if I’d recommend the game to anyone, no matter how much their tastes aligned with my own. It wouldn’t seem realistic for me to expect someone to enjoy it. I absolutely did though. I’m not sure I’d ask for more games like it, or I’d have engaged with it nearly as much as I did if it had come from anyone else, but I’m certainly grateful that it exists.
Video version
I don’t use these GOTY projects to surprise anyone. I use them to discuss what makes me love these games so much. It’s now my duty to tell you how much I love Death Stranding.
Without wanting to get too personal or accusatory, in recent years, I’ve seen people become more doubtful of Kojima, and questioning whether they actually like him. Some have criticised his ego, his consideration for his audience and his sexual politics. You’re entitled to take issue with any of that. I love Hideo Kojima though. I admire his deep sincerity, his humour, his warmth, his ambition and his rich understanding of the potential of games. I love the guy who had us hatch an owl from an egg to convince a guard it was nighttime in Metal Gear 2. I love the guy who had us turn up the volume on our TVs to hear a timebomb in Snatcher, before loudly exploding it and having a character tell us off for making such a racket. I love the guy who consistently used one of the biggest franchises in games to spread messages about the horrors of nuclear weapons, the ugly history of war, and how tragic it would be to lose human civilisation to those things. I love Hideo Kojima, and Death Stranding is the most quintessentially Hideo Kojima thing to be released as a commercial product in decades.
For me, Kojima’s design has always been about constraints and limitations. It’s what elevates his work. Kojima started out with no ambition of becoming the influential game director he is today. He just wanted to work in a creative field. Metal Gear wasn’t some genius formula that Kojima came up with out of nowhere, but a pithy response to how hard it was to make action games on the MSX2. You couldn’t make a game where enemies and bullets flooded the screen, but you could make one about avoiding them. Constraints and limitations were what the player were faced with too. The harsh, angular walls shaping the rooms, pushing you to encounter guards and obstacles, and strategically responding to those limits to push through to success. They often push the player to rethink what the limitations are too. Why can’t the game’s packaging provide the solution to a puzzle? It’s liberating to discover that the game’s constraints extend beyond what’s presented on screen. That kind of thinking runs through Kojima’s games, and it’s what makes them so much more than moving an avatar from cutscene to cutscene.
This thinking is at the forefront in Death Stranding. If you want to enjoy it, it means learning to love the constraints. Planning your routes through dangerous, lonely wilderness. Ensuring you have everything you need, but not more than you can carry. Knowing when you can take a threat head-on, or if you’re better off avoiding it. You can talk about the silly acronyms and nonsense jargon as much as you like, but if you ask me, it’s this stuff that’s the meat and potatoes of Kojima’s action games.
Exploring Death Stranding’s stark, desolate hills and valleys, keeping myself aware of all the threats acting against me, was a real treat for me. I’ve never played an open world game where the shape of a landscape affected my approach so dramatically. Death Stranding’s topography is intended to feel wild and natural. It’s such a departure from Metal Gear Solid, where the level design was so precisely arranged that it was constructed from Lego before it was written into code. The brilliance is how it invites the players to conquer the most dangerous areas, design their own solutions to tame them, and share that with the online community. You’re exploring the world and figuring out how to survive in it, as a group, mutually benefiting each member. This is how humanity first thrived. This is why societies were established. This is connecting you to the potency of the game’s message directly through playing it.
As you make your way through the game, placing more tools and contributing to more group projects, you’ll reap the benefits of everything other players have done with the game. Cutting the pain out of traveling between outposts really makes you feel that society is coming together again. You appreciate it, and want to know how you can help those who helped you. You want to contribute in ways that benefit the most people you can. Kojima is trying to help players take on the issues that worry him, in the field where he has the most influence. He’s making his mark and asking us to do the same in our lives. It’s an incredible thing to do with a game, and the end result is elegantly built on the decades of experience he’s gained from games development. Death Stranding isn’t a statement on modern culture, but a message to it. It wants to help. How often do we talk about videogames like this? At this point, shouldn’t it be more?
Death Stranding carries a heavy burden – I know that’s something of a pun, but so many of the names and ideas in the game seem designed to force you into making them. Not only carrying the weight of being the first title from the new, independent Kojima Productions, pushing to bring themselves the recognition of a studio capable of Triple A work, but also the weight of the massively compromised version of The Phantom Pain that was released, and the cancellation of Silent Hills and Zone of the Enders 3. Casting Norman Reedus and Guillermo del Toro as main characters seemed to indicate that Kojima’s plans for those projects would be incorporated into Death Stranding, and there is some evidence for that in the final text. The story touches upon the circumstances that bring people into terrorism, child labor, the power of fear and monsters, and the ancient Egyptian understanding of death and the soul – things that were suggested to be key focuses of the Project Ogre version of MGSV, Silent Hills and ZOE3, respectively. For an ardent supporter of Kojima’s career, it’s cathartic to see something come out of the plans that were quashed by his previous employer. It underlines the fact that Kojima is going to make the kind of stuff he wasn’t allowed to at Konami.
Some of my favourite parts of the game are the text documents and the memory chips that document pieces of art or everyday tools. Things that really paint the picture of what it would mean if the world lost its connection to history, culture and science. It’s one thing to imagine a fractured society where people don’t communicate, but quite another to picture a future where we don’t know what Godzilla is, and how much it would mean to regain that knowledge. Death Stranding is at its best when it’s making me appreciate the historical impact of coffee cups. The wee things that make you really thankful for the work of strangers, and interested in subjects that you might have previously taken for granted. Kojima’s curiosity and appreciation for culture is all over Death Stranding, and it would take a bitterly jaded cynic to not find some value in what he’s saying.
I entirely understand why people don’t like Death Stranding, and I don’t think any less of them for that. It’s a game that’s willfully grueling and repetitive. It doesn’t fulfill a lot of the criteria that many would want from a game. The high-minded social commentary and dark science fiction concepts often clash hard against the videogamey characters and poop jokes. I don’t know if I’d recommend the game to anyone, no matter how much their tastes aligned with my own. It wouldn’t seem realistic for me to expect someone to enjoy it. I absolutely did though. I’m not sure I’d ask for more games like it, or I’d have engaged with it nearly as much as I did if it had come from anyone else, but I’m certainly grateful that it exists.