Hellboy meets the wild west!! I really liked the look of this game and the flow of gameplay.

Really cool variety of weapons that I never used and fighting styles. The game would be like "hey you can use this frozen pistol in combination with this neat rifle, or you can use the different kind of pistols while melee range and-" and I would just straight up take 2 shotguns at the same time and continue my run. I would lie if I'd say that I didn't had an absolute blast, the perfect combination of something nostalgic and adrenaline inducing.

But I would also lie if I'd say that the game doesn't have its problems. Sure, it has the anticipated vibe of an indie game from the start but I still have a hate/love relationship with the cover systems - It's frustrating at times. I would've loved to see more attention to this game regarding the voice acting (the Plain walker is the only character that talks) and maybe more lore since it had amazing potential and after finishing it has great chance of being extremely forgettable.

Separated somehow as if from cinematography like "Tree of Life" or Kaufmanc's weird "I'm thinking of ending things" and other of his tiles; Death Stranding is the kind of game that is absolutely beautiful and mesmerizing in its storytelling and world building, carefully crafted to make you tear up in the worst moments. The environments are beautiful and it's the closest an AAA title can get to being poetic I think - from the first hours of the game you already get the feeling that you're not playing just the same game refurbished with some graphical update on top. Though it does get a while to unravel itself, since at its core its a really slow game in terms of pacing, and if you're the impatient gamer type you might spend around 5 hours for the gameplay to really take off and the exposition part to disappear.

The gameplay in Death Standing is simple, you pick up and order, strategize your route on the map and then you... walk, and after a while you walk some more, a song plays while somehow melancholia crawls behind you, and then you walk again. The combat is interesting enough and there's this unique mechanic - spoiler ahead - of people online interacting with your game though the "chryal" network and you can use ladders, roads vehicles from one another. Borrow them and let other players use your stuff though system which you receive likes for the people you've helped. It creates this good sensation of community, the stranded type game as Kojima describes it. You'd expect this kind of gameplay to wear off instantly in 2 hours and belive me I thought the same but it just.. kept going? And I never once felt extremely bored or un-entertained and this is coming from someone that absolutely despises base management games and strategies but in this game playing as Sam and delivering packages just felt cozy. I would play the game for 10 hours continuously one day and refuse to eat because I just needed to take up one more order. Just one more y'know?
And on a personal taste the soundtrack it just felt.. Right. It was epic, especially since I'm a big fan of Low Roar and I listened to 80% of this game's soundtrack before already during my high-school years and coming back and revisiting all these musical pieces hit me the just amount of right with nostalgia. Everytime a song would a song would pop up during the gameplay I'd feel this immense undescribable catharsis and damn you gotta appreciate when art pieces do that to you y'know? On finishing the first big section of the map I remember having this bike racing down the mountain while Asylum for the Feeling played, somehow on the wrong turn I fell too much downwards and the bike exploded. I took all my packages back and I had to take the rest of the path walking, listening to the rest of the song. I don't know why, and I'm still trying to piece up my feelings after playing this game, you know the "conversations we have with a piece of art" after we finish them and I'm still trying to piece together all these feelings. I'm still trying to understand this type of loneliness in Death Stranding that I felt constantly, this utterly new shade of existential nihilism that I adore. The vast unknown somehow.
It's undescribable and I deeply feel that the more I try to put this feeling into a box, into well shaped words the more it loses its meaning. KOJIMA's sense of artistry in this game truly feels unique and the characters design, ideas, and unfamiliarity fed to you constantly through the visual spectacle.

I grew up to adore every character of the main cast - felt like I was experiencing a timeless classic at times, with a beautiful story. I adore the lore and this unique take of weirdness on enemies and gameplay. Screaming at this game for 5 minutes "WHAT?" during a bizzare cutscene just like I did it's the correct way to play Death Stranding. The incorrect way would be expecting a generic third person game, that doesn't challenge your world views. The themes about humanity, nihilism, and environment awareness somehow are the core of Death Stranding's amazing aesthetics. I'm so excited for DS2 though. And until then, just one more order, right?