This review contains spoilers

Kojima can dress it up with whatever sci-fi jargon he wants, but his distrust and borderline paranoia about the institutions that make up society and the people that control them is clear to see. Sam, a man who will scar if he physically touches another person, travels across the entirety of America making connections for the makeshift president who never even existed in the first place and was using him as a tool for extinction the entire time. The game is littered with contradictions and ironies like this and it tells me that Kojima has little faith in the people in power and that efforts to unify will be fruitless if the foundations are built on murder and deceit and the exploitation of others. Kojima finds the inevitability of death and the existential cycles we’re all locked into terrifying, even soul crushing (“the world’s still broken… I’ve got no ties to anyone or anything. I might as well be dead”). The world and everyone in it are doomed to experience the same pain over and over again until an extinction resets everything. But there’s also comfort in that. There’s something reassuring about the knowledge that others have come before you and persevered through whatever hardship they faced, because it means you can do it too

Reviewed on Oct 25, 2021


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