👍 compelling and stylish opening, got me excited to finally sit down and play this

😍 seeing lea seydoux here after enjoying her in crimes of the future (my favorite film of the year) is lovely and her (fragile's) spiky black outfit is sick as hell, also she eats a weird floating space grub and seems to be aroused by this

🔥 the bt scene where a necrotic human body triggers a voidout - everything going on here is wild and mysterious and holy shit all at once

😬 uncanny del toro with some other guy's voice

🤡 "make america whole again!" the word "america" appears in dialogue about 600 times in 30 minutes, and i'm thinking this is taking a turn for the very dumb and the already extremely blunt themes of social reconnection should be more universal, in some anonymous earthly setting... but no - america, y'all

😱 are you a bad enough reedus to carry the president's (also your mom's) corpse to the incinerator before she makes neo knot city e-x-p-l-o-d-e

🌧️ long stretch of solitudinous trekking, leaden interactions with npc holograms praising you-reedus and almost a hint at something about the working class and their labor being the lifeblood of a functioning country but this game isn't that subtle and that's probably not even remotely within kojima's wheelhouse

👼 while sam's laconic and distant demeanor is familiar and comfortable to me, i also find myself identifying with his affinity for bb more than i had expected

💩 lol poop grenades

💬 none of the structures i build are getting likes from other players (some of them have tens of thousands) and the gameplay loop of making deliveries is buckling under the weight of kojima's hubris... i'm getting some sort of comfort or fulfillment out of working out the logistics of making deliveries and prepping for each journey, ensuring that i have the blood bombs and repair spray i may need, etc. but if this goes on for 20-30 hours uhhh idk

💀 do i even like this game? it's painfully heavy-handed and none of its characters are particularly interesting, least of all the fucking cool looking golden skull masked villain voiced by a troy baker devouring scenery (going hard, as everyone says too much now) while saying virtually jack shit... right now i would say the phantom pain was actually much better, and death stranding is starting to feel like its inverse - a failure of a game driven by some really cool ideas

🌈 i do feel, still, that i could come out at the end of this feeling all the drudgery and vacuousness were worth it, so i will continue playing (it's a relaxing distraction from my fucked brain anyway) and perhaps say more when i am done