Once, there was an explosion, a bang that gave rise to life as we know it. And then, came the next explosion. An explosion that will be our last.

Those words from the opening of Hideo Kojima’s epic Death Stranding sat in the back of my head for the nearly 70 hours I spent playing the game. Kojima always has an underlying message with his projects and for some reason, those lines, among the hundreds of others within the dialogue, were the ones that stuck with me.

Even after getting the gist of the game's message midway through, it wasn’t until the game reached its twilight moments that I fully comprehended this quote’s gravity.

Death Stranding is a game that has been divisive for many reasons. Some won’t find anything appealing about the “Fed Ex simulator” as it has been mockingly reduced to and some find Kojima’s ego grating. Those are all fair assessments, but I think some people may be missing the point.

In this game, nothing is superfluous. In many open-world titles, which have littered the release windows this generation, all the emphasis is on the destinations. Rarely is time given to contextualize the game’s world. Open worlds merely serve to artificially extend the experience out, a sandbox that exists instead of thoughtful level design.

This couldn’t be further from the truth for Death Stranding.

In Death Stranding, gameplay consists of delivering items between destinations and encouraging denizens, existing in the wake of an apocalypse that has destroyed America, to join a new nation and become part of a connected network. You must efficiently adjust your inventory for optimal weight distribution while simultaneously traversing through hazardous territory that can range from swamps, rocky hills, and blizzard-laden mountain peaks that would make Everest shudder.

What happens at point A and point B is important, for sure. The people you make deliveries to are grateful for and eventually join the network you’re creating during your trek from the East to the West Coast of America. But the real meat and potatoes of the game is the experience of what happens during the journey.

Whereas navigating worlds in other games is often an afterthought — a way to artificially extend the experience — it is the game in Death Stranding. Some have compared it to walking simulators like Gone Home. But even in those games, the walking only serves to vector the player between items and points of interest. All of the exposition will occur when reaching these locations but nothing really occurs between them.

Every aspect of the gameplay is methodical. You have to plan ahead and decide what tools are most important since they take up weight just like the cargo you will be carrying. You can be thrown off balance by rocks, slopes, or water. You can run out of stamina while trying to balance your load and end up dropping and damaging it. Mercenaries can try to steal it or even kill you. Every moment of this game demands your attention and engagement.

I expected Death Stranding to be a statement of games not needing to be fun to be good, like Spec Ops: The Line or Depression Quest. But that wasn’t the case.

Death Stranding is a blast. All of the game’s meticulous mechanics and contextualization result in an addictive, rewarding gameplay loop that shaved hours off my days before I realized it.

When playing Death Stranding, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus came to mind. Camus’s central argument is that in the face of overwhelming adversity and the apparent insignificance one person’s existence may have, shouldn’t individuals just kill themselves? Get it over with? If there’s no purpose, if the universe is apathetic to our struggles, then why bother? What’s the point?

Camus analogizes this futility with the Greek tale of Sisyphus, a being who is cursed by the gods to carry a boulder up a hill by day only to have it fall down at night. Then to do it again every day for eternity. Given the burden he incessantly carries on his shoulders and the futility of his actions, one could assume him miserable.

But in rejecting nihilistic thoughts and finding purpose in the actions he can control, defining his own existence, and moving forward even when something might seem fruitless, one can imagine Sisyphus happy.
Comparatively, when Sam Bridges, the player character, feels what he is doing may serve no purpose, he carries on. He also does so in the face of nihilistic antagonists such as Higgs, who is aware of a systematic disaster that will end all life. His motivation is to expedite humanity’s extinction in the face of its inevitable end.

This brings us back to that opening quote. Near the end of the game, I realized Death Stranding was a commentary on the global climate crisis – that this seemingly inescapable calamity facing our planet means we should probably just not care.

But Death Stranding says otherwise.

There is a purpose in the struggle. Purpose in the moment-to-moment decisions we make. Purpose in the relationships we build with those around us.

One of the core gameplay mechanics is asynchronous multiplayer. If I reach an obstacle, I can use one of my tools to build a bridge to cross a ravine or drop a rope to rappel down a cliff. These things you left behind by you will appear in other players’ games to offer them relief if they don’t share the same tools to build what’s necessary. It speaks to a level of communal effort.

This ties into the game’s social system of “likes.” Players can click a dedicated like button, resulting in positive reinforcement and doubling the same appreciation that non-player characters have for Sam and the player by extension.

Norman Reedus’s performance as Sam and Mads Mikkelson’s as Cliff Unger are outstanding. Well-acted and voiced, the characters all feel human. Kojima’s camera work rivals that of some film directors, and the attention to detail is staggering.

The relationship with BB, your infantile companion who can sense the BTs (who are made of a substance very similar in appearance and viscosity to oil), the game’s main antagonistic force, was genuine. I ended up caring about BB as if they were a real person. One of the most poignant moments in the game involves the culmination of Sam and BB’s relationship, which came after the narrative climax and had me reaching for tissues.

Death Stranding is flawed, as all games are. The script can be clunky, and Kojima’s penchant for convoluted character development still remains. However, the genius of Death Stranding is in its confrontation of existence which captures the essence of the digital age by using gameplay to manifest our collective pathos.

What I took from this game is that though things might seem bleak, none of us are alone in our struggles. We have to take things day by day and work together towards building a future and that a better world is always possible.

Nothing is truly futile and all we have is us.

Should’ve finished this months ago but got a bit burnt out and distracted with other games for a while. Overall I enjoyed it a lot and prefer it to FF15, but somewhat conflicted as a few things did keep it from being a favorite of mine by the end

The coolest thing about FF16’s definitely the sheer spectacle of its boss fights and set pieces, which is probably the best I’ve ever seen? It doesn’t really let up at all from start to finish either, would highly recommend it for that alone honestly. That said while those very high points are consistently spread throughout the main story, the moment to moment gameplay in between is… less impressive

The action combat’s really fun, but past a point it started to wear itself out for me with how much you fight the same mobs of enemies and not much variation with Clive’s weapons and Eikon abilities. And areas to explore are fairly empty save for the side quests which are just kinda there, mostly inoffensive and I didn’t mind how there were just a few at a time between main missions (at least til the end when they start dropping a lot at once), but not a highlight either

I did like the story for the most part, though it’s one where I feel it has an amazing start then kinda settles once it opens up, which wasn’t bad but wish it kept that kind of momentum for it. The darker world-building was interesting and Clive was a good character, but I think the last 1/4 of it stretched on a bit too long. And I also definitely felt the lack of more party members, there are temporary followers like Jill but most of the game is just Clive and Torgal on their own and felt they could’ve done more with the cast there