Yeenie
2017
This game would've killed on the xbox 360 arcade in 2007
2023
This review contains spoilers
You're a good person if you commit suicide and a bad person if you don't
People often wonder where the fun is in this game. Everyone's first experience with this game is stumbling around a mountain, slowly picking up scattered cargo, and walking to where an objective marker is pointing you to. It's a monotonous task that many people can just brush off as boring tutorial stuff, but then they get to the Eastern Region and realize that no, that's actually the whole game. And that's where they fall off, and that's where the frequent deriding of Death Stranding as a "walking simulator" comes from.
I am an insane person and I completed all 540 orders on Very Hard and unlocked every achievement in the process. I understand this isn't fun for the grand majority of people. Sometimes it wasn't even fun for me. Especially when doing the race track time trials. But in doing so, I was able to understand why this game gripped me as much as it did: the structures.
I love Death Stranding's structures so much. They all fulfill unique functions, they can all be placed anywhere you want, and they all leave your mark on the world itself. Want to just relax somewhere in the world without worrying about timefall? Build a timefall shelter. Need to get up and down a mountain quickly? Build a zipline. In a remote area and want to repair your vehicle or take a rest? Build a shelter. Every structure you see in the game - whether it's yours or another player's - tells the story of someone who had a problem and built something to create a solution.
They also deal with a problem that isn't unique to Death Stranding and which plagued Hideo Kojima's previous game: the empty open world. It is not realistic for video games to have huge open worlds and to fill the majority of that space with hand crafted content. Especially higher graphical fidelity games like what Kojima prefers to make. So instead, Kojima leaves it on the players to fill the open world themselves with the structures that they want, and that in turn fills in the world for other players. There really isnt any feeling like climbing up a mountain, running low on batteries, and finding a generator that another player left there. Or doing a delivery in a strict time limit and making use of someone's bridge that you previously thought was pointless. Or setting up a zipline network and getting someone's zipline that is in just the perfect spot. I never feel the game's theme of bringing people together more than when someone else's structures save me. And I never feel happier than when the game tells me that another player used or upgraded my own structures.
Death Stranding 2 needs to expand the selection of structures to build. I want elevators for vehicles that can take you up and down steep slopes. I want tunnels that you can drill into the sides of mountains and create your own passages. I want towers that can overlook enemy camps and allow me a vantage point to snipe them. I also want aesthetic structures! Paving over footpaths with rocks or concrete, water fountains, flower beds, the ability to paint them different colors! The structures are what populate the world, they're what gives you connections to other players, they're where the fun is! I think the way they're implemented now is good enough, but I truly hope they're given a larger emphasis in the sequel.
I am an insane person and I completed all 540 orders on Very Hard and unlocked every achievement in the process. I understand this isn't fun for the grand majority of people. Sometimes it wasn't even fun for me. Especially when doing the race track time trials. But in doing so, I was able to understand why this game gripped me as much as it did: the structures.
I love Death Stranding's structures so much. They all fulfill unique functions, they can all be placed anywhere you want, and they all leave your mark on the world itself. Want to just relax somewhere in the world without worrying about timefall? Build a timefall shelter. Need to get up and down a mountain quickly? Build a zipline. In a remote area and want to repair your vehicle or take a rest? Build a shelter. Every structure you see in the game - whether it's yours or another player's - tells the story of someone who had a problem and built something to create a solution.
They also deal with a problem that isn't unique to Death Stranding and which plagued Hideo Kojima's previous game: the empty open world. It is not realistic for video games to have huge open worlds and to fill the majority of that space with hand crafted content. Especially higher graphical fidelity games like what Kojima prefers to make. So instead, Kojima leaves it on the players to fill the open world themselves with the structures that they want, and that in turn fills in the world for other players. There really isnt any feeling like climbing up a mountain, running low on batteries, and finding a generator that another player left there. Or doing a delivery in a strict time limit and making use of someone's bridge that you previously thought was pointless. Or setting up a zipline network and getting someone's zipline that is in just the perfect spot. I never feel the game's theme of bringing people together more than when someone else's structures save me. And I never feel happier than when the game tells me that another player used or upgraded my own structures.
Death Stranding 2 needs to expand the selection of structures to build. I want elevators for vehicles that can take you up and down steep slopes. I want tunnels that you can drill into the sides of mountains and create your own passages. I want towers that can overlook enemy camps and allow me a vantage point to snipe them. I also want aesthetic structures! Paving over footpaths with rocks or concrete, water fountains, flower beds, the ability to paint them different colors! The structures are what populate the world, they're what gives you connections to other players, they're where the fun is! I think the way they're implemented now is good enough, but I truly hope they're given a larger emphasis in the sequel.
2018
a solid game with 100 very minor annoyances that all unfortunately add up. Yagami isn't as funny or interesting as Ichiban and Kiryu, and it feels like they offloaded all the fun personality traits onto his friend Kaito. We should play as him instead
2021
Arches feels like a deeply personal story that I stumbled into, about an experience that I will never understand being told by someone that didn't expect me to be there. It's like I intruded on the most intimate moment of a stranger's life. I wish I wasn't just an outsider looking in.
This game drops the ball on interesting plot threads about as often as it drops Deus Ex Machinas to get the protagonist out of the corners they write him in.
This review contains spoilers
I enjoyed this game a lot. I enjoyed it so much that i hate that it is the way it is.
This game is ugly. That is completely intentional. Both as a way to keep development costs down and as an effective way of maintaining its gloomy and dark tone. What I don't believe was intentional is the fact that this game's ugly graphics make it virtually impossible to discern details in certain scenes that are vital to playing the game without guesswork.
You will have to make complete guesses in this game. It is not a failure on your part. It's because this game is so ugly that its impossible for anyone without an extremely trained eye to tell anything in the environment apart without the game highlighting it for you. The game knows it's ugly, and will go to great lengths to smooth over the presentation by cheating some of the detective work for you. But it is unable to do this for everything.
And so I, like most of (if not all) the people that played this game, had to resort to guessing. I hated that I had to start guessing. You only get to play this game once, and I've permanently soured myself because I cheated. But there is no one on this Earth who could genuinely solve this entire game without doing so, because that would require a certain graphical fidelity that this game doesn't have.
A game with clearer graphics would be justified in having a puzzle where you must tell apart 4 lowly seamen by just their shoes. Perhaps this game would also not make those identical seamen all Chinese. I, like thousands of others who played this game, just randomly assigned them names until I got a hit. It wasn't satisfying. I didn't feel good about bruteforcing the game's puzzles. But that's just what everyone has to do when they're nearing the end of this game. It was not just those 4 Chinese men - you will likely have to make lots of guesses during the endgame, despite the ever-dwindling number of possible suspects. It's a common experience.
I want another game in this genre. I want to see a game that is exactly like this, except with visuals that don't hurt my eyes to look at. Finishing Obra Dinn has left me longing for an experience it couldn't provide and a game that doesn't exist. It's such a fantastic game that wears its ugly exterior with pride. But I just can't forgive it for being that way.
This game is ugly. That is completely intentional. Both as a way to keep development costs down and as an effective way of maintaining its gloomy and dark tone. What I don't believe was intentional is the fact that this game's ugly graphics make it virtually impossible to discern details in certain scenes that are vital to playing the game without guesswork.
You will have to make complete guesses in this game. It is not a failure on your part. It's because this game is so ugly that its impossible for anyone without an extremely trained eye to tell anything in the environment apart without the game highlighting it for you. The game knows it's ugly, and will go to great lengths to smooth over the presentation by cheating some of the detective work for you. But it is unable to do this for everything.
And so I, like most of (if not all) the people that played this game, had to resort to guessing. I hated that I had to start guessing. You only get to play this game once, and I've permanently soured myself because I cheated. But there is no one on this Earth who could genuinely solve this entire game without doing so, because that would require a certain graphical fidelity that this game doesn't have.
A game with clearer graphics would be justified in having a puzzle where you must tell apart 4 lowly seamen by just their shoes. Perhaps this game would also not make those identical seamen all Chinese. I, like thousands of others who played this game, just randomly assigned them names until I got a hit. It wasn't satisfying. I didn't feel good about bruteforcing the game's puzzles. But that's just what everyone has to do when they're nearing the end of this game. It was not just those 4 Chinese men - you will likely have to make lots of guesses during the endgame, despite the ever-dwindling number of possible suspects. It's a common experience.
I want another game in this genre. I want to see a game that is exactly like this, except with visuals that don't hurt my eyes to look at. Finishing Obra Dinn has left me longing for an experience it couldn't provide and a game that doesn't exist. It's such a fantastic game that wears its ugly exterior with pride. But I just can't forgive it for being that way.