Somewhere in this weird piece of art is an idea for a very good video game, but you have to suffer through monotonous fetch quests, annoying gameplay, and an obtuse story to experience even a hint of that idea.

Death Stranding does that thing that a lot of games do - it throws you into an environment that clearly spells out your limitations before slowly introducing tools to make your journey easier. The difference is it's not like "You could only jump before, but now you can double jump. Isn't that fun!?"
It's more like "You don't know how to walk down a hill because you're a big dumb man baby. Struggle through this for 10 hours and then we'll give you something to make it not suck." Every minute I spent walking around in that world was a constant battle of "Wow this sure looks beautiful I can't wait to explore it more" and "Oh I beefed it again on a pebble while walking up a slight incline".

Every single upgrade or improvement you get in the game isn't to make a fun game more fun, it's to make the game you are playing suck less.
"Walking with a load sure does suck, huh? Here have this"
"Traveling this long distance over and over is boring. Make a road to make it faster"
But you still have to put in a lot of work to even build these structures to make your life easier. So you either struggle to complete your journey or you struggle to collect resources to build a bridge to make it easier to complete your journey. Yay?

The social/"strand" portion of Death Stranding I think is some of the coolest stuff I've experienced in a game. Building bridges, roads, or other structures that you or others can use to make you journey a little easier is a lot of work but also satisfying. The fact that those structures can then be used by other players is very cool, even if it did feel like I was the only one in my world actually contributing to these projects.
I'd spend hours working on these roads and the contributions from others was measly.

I can stomach boring gameplay if the story is at least holding my interest along the way. And while I wouldn't call Death Stranding's story uninteresting, I definitely wouldn't call it good. The vibe of this game consist of characters with goofy names delivering horribly-written lines of dialogue with deadly-serious tone all while Monster energy drinks and ads for Norman Reedus's real life TV show on AMC are in the background. It's a game that simultaneously takes itself so seriously and not seriously at all. Honestly, normally, I think that kind of thing can be kind of funny but every second of this game had me scratching my head and asking "This is the video game mastermind everyone worships?"

+ Gorgeous world
+ Incredible soundtrack
+ Really cool building/social element

- Gameplay loop is just nonstop fetch quests
- Getting around the world is actively not fun until you put the work in to make it suck less
- BT encounters are stressful
- Nonsense story
- Conflicting tone