Building connections

It's funny how life works sometimes. I never had the original intention of playing Death Stranding until a friend gave it to me out of nowhere for giving her something for Christmas and yet here I am several weeks later thanking her once again after going for every achievement and over a hundred hours. The reason I bring this up is that it relates to how Death Stranding wants you to experience the benefits of being part of something more than a single entity hoping we don't regret it.

I had a lot of reservations going into this one with how I knew that if the gameplay didn't keep my hands moving and my mind contained throughout the whole experience in that I wouldn't like it but Death Stranding has a surprising amount of depth in how to approach every delivery. The act of just delivering and constantly running around isn't what makes Death Stranding completely unique in this facet but the act of "walking" and "traversal" makes this one of the most engaging experiences for a first time. All of this wrapped in one of the most heavy handed and odd writing style for a Kojima game in my opinion makes this one of the best open world games by a long mile.

It's probably the first time in a while that I felt like it was quite obvious what Kojima wanted to tell with this title. The world is disconnected from everything due to an deathly apocalypse called the Death Stranding. Everyone is out for themselves and too scared to even go outside relying on porters to survive like our protagonist, Sam Bridges. Sam never had a connection to the human society except for one moment and then it being taken away has let him believe that connections are meaningless and only bring pain. One of the best parts of his development was going all over America, meeting new people and helping them bring stuff. There's a personal satisfaction when you've done all you can and their best reward isn't some random item or overpowered item but opening that door for you and letting you in. Doing all this made me feel the change was genuine as I felt the same way too, I ended up helping everyone except one person. I won't say who it is but one of the preppers you meet is really sick and their deliveries consist of bringing medicine to them. I ended up doing this for a while until I almost maxed them out until I decided to do story and hold on delivering packages to them. After a while, I decided to deliver one final package to this person so I can max out our connection and then I wondered why they didn't pick up when I came but saw a BT. After I delivered my package and received an email from them asking where we were and only hoping we were continuing the good fight before sharing the news that they moved on from this world. It's a small thing but it made me sad that I couldn't deliver that one final package for them. To my dismay, I found out you can keep them alive but you had to constantly deliver to them throughout your whole experience but people will probably tend to move on from them from a gameplay standpoint like I did. "Why go back when you already maxed them out?" is what people thought until this happened but it's just surprising that it actually happened. With all that said, the supporting cast are interesting and even with cheesy names like Deadman or Heartman (guess what this guy is all about), they still manage to hit the right spots in the emotional space with the game beginning how it ends in a sense.

I feel like watching Death Stranding's gameplay is deceiving yourself in the sense you only see it in its simplest form. When you watch someone going up the hill carrying something in their hand, you expect not much is happening on the controller or attention span but to someone actually holding the controller, there's a lot going on and this is one of the best strengths of Death Stranding. Open world games tend to have this problem of going from point A to B being some of the most minut interactions in their games with the player running forward or being in a vehicle and driving there but in Death Stranding, the world puts up a fight. It won't make things easy until you work to make them easy. Running up hill requires you to manage stamina and your balance along with any cargo you might have, holding an item in your hand isn't just a button press but requires holding down the trigger button based on your hand. I initially thought it was tedious to constantly hold down the trigger to hold something in your hand but it does make sense. When you're holding an item in real life, it's not a touch but a constant effort of holding and holding down the trigger represents that your arm is in constant effort of holding up the arm which I thought was pretty intuitive. The gameplay loop mostly kept my hands and fingers on the control going through a death torn America trying to get a video game collector an old PSP system. Fortunately that's not all there is to the "traversal" as the game gives you plenty of tools to circumvent the worst the world and the terrain has to offer. Starting out with ladders and climbing hooks and then turning into elaborate structures like ziplines and bridges. You can eventually build a network of structures that make the world a little easier on you and your boots but that's not all. The online experience is what I feel is the definitive experience for Death Stranding as you don't just your world but a shared one. Various signs of life, tools rusted out from use long ago, and networks already set up are here to help you as your tools and structures help them. You are never alone. It starts to feel more like collective doing everything it can to make everything easier which is how it should be. Personal satisfaction when I poured the most effort into making roads for everyone to get through easier and the only form of thanks is "likes" which don't really serve much of a purpose is all you need sometimes. It also helps that the world just provides a variety of challenges to confront to endless ravines, rocky surfaces, to snowy mountains that tax every facet of your health and tools so you'll need to stay connected to make the most of everyone's efforts. There are vehicles in the game and you're probably thinking "well that'll just make everything easy and trivial like every other open world game" but actually using them might make you think otherwise. They're mostly for flat surfaces or roads you already built since the rocks on the ground will immediately stop you on your tracks to frustration even more so with trucks that provide a lot of cargo space for bigger orders but become bordering on wielding outside of anything but roads unless you know how to drive up the terrain properly. All these tools and I'm reminded of Metal Gear Solid V where Venom Snake had every tool and gun in his arsenal to perform stealth and missions however he wanted in an open world environment and now Death Stranding gives you these tools and structures to perform deliveries and missions in any way you wanted in an open world environment as well.

Apart from "traversal", there's two forms of combat in Death Stranding in which you fight the living and fight the dead. Fighting MULEs which are the human combatants will eventually be required of you and you'll hopefully prepared some tools for it. Early on you'll have a Bola gun that only really ties them up for you to incapicatate later until later on when you get non lethal conventional weapons like assault rifles and shotguns. I really think you can approach these camps early on in a stealthy manner and it would work for the most part and feel a bit fun since you don't have much but eventually when you get the bola gun, you can just shoot them at mules that essentially just run towards you anyway so it stops being a challenge. Later on though, MULEs get a huge upgrade in capability that makes them pretty fun to go against for a while in that they're actually trying to kill you with guns. It's pretty jarring that they do this considering actually killing someone is something you don't want to do. BTs initially feel like this horror mechanic in the preferred way is to go past them undetected since you don't really have any single way of fighting them for a bit and I liked this dichotomy of relaxing traversal and having to keep focus on going through a BT infested zone in the world. You do eventually get tools and weapons that let you fight BTs more efficiently that it unfortunately feels like an annoyance more than something you should be scared of at some point. Boss battles rely on these huge creature like monstrosities that take a lot of damage to defeat and will probably run out of ammo if it wasn't for the other players coming from the tar and helping you by throwing blood bags and rocket launchers. I do recommend playing on Hard at least to keep this a bit challenging and not completely mindless as you will still die pretty quick without armor on Hard. Overall I find this aspect of the game adequate but it was never really the focus of the experience but a good way to break up the action.

As I've mentioned before, the multiplayer aspect of Death Stranding is essential to fully enjoying this experience. Apart from being in a shared world where you can see other people's structures and struggles, you can see warnings of danger, deliver their lost cargo for them if it's on the way anyway, help them with weapons or tools if they really need it or donate materials so everyone can use them. There's a lot of ways to help the collective of people you're with and I think it's the best use of asynchronous multiplayer yet. The traversal also doesn't get made easy by this as you have to face the challenge yourself at least once before you get connected in specific areas too.

The sound of metal clanking against the weight of your cargo, small medleys playing during specific moments in the world. The music and sound of Death Stranding reaches a high note in what was used and how it was used. The highlight is the usage of music throughout the game playing these licensed haunting and serene songs from Low Roar and Silent Poets to give a few examples. It really helps to reflect how quiet the world can be in its photographic view of america based on Iceland from what I can tell. Going down a snowy mountain and it becoming a grass hill while this is playing is a zen like experience that's hard to describe when the game puts you into this reflective state of mind. My favorite original piece has to be this and when you hear it makes it one of my favorite experiences I've had in a bit. The whole song feels somber and later on sounds like one of Sufjan Steven's electronica efforts. I do understand why they didn't have a music player for this game considering its use during certain moments but they could've made it a reward for completing the game or a 100% reward at least.

With all that said, I can understand that this game isn't for everyone or a purely perfect game to anyone but I think in terms of how this game carries out itself is extremely rare and something I wish for more in the industry in general. Death Stranding practices what it preaches and then some with some of the most innovative open world gameplay I've played in a long time, themes I can understand due to my personal isolation barring COVID and the fear of connecting with people. I always felt like every link I made with people is something tangible people can eventually cut off and cutting something always hurts. Reaching out might not be so bad after all. Even in the way BTs are, even in death we are always connected and are never gone from this world as long as that connection is there. We are always connected.