Although I loved Death Stranding when I played it through on release, I didn't really consider it a contender for my game of the year in The Year of Endless Bangers. I let three years slip by, not even booting it back up on the release of the Director's Cut, before ultimately using my new PS5 as an excuse to transfer the save and bang out a few more deliveries.

So much has changed for me in the intervening three years. Others have written at length about the pandemic and its thematic parallels with the game, so suffice it to say that for me (still largely housebound and isolated, increasingly alienated by the fever-pitch denial of the world at large) being able to enact a world where real people work together to build infrastructure and thereby heal the world has been personally healing in a way I couldn't have imagined in 2019.

My tastes as someone who thinks critically about games have changed as well. Death Stranding's preoccupation with the texture of play—from asking you to viscerally feel the geometry of the ground you walk on to showing painstakingly mocapped cutscenes of every little action in your private room—hits much harder now that I've played through the FromSoft canon which is itself texture-obsessed in a different direction. Coming directly off playing some AAA shlock, I also found myself with a renewed appreciation of this game's dialectic approach to a cinematic aesthetic, with carefully choreographed moments that nevertheless always emphasize play as the distinguishing factor that makes this decidedly not a movie.

I'm setting this down again not because I'm finished with it for good, but because I'm inducting it into the tier of games I intend to return to over and over again. I could happily finish out the DC plots and call it "finished", but what I really want is to create a kind of personal infrastructure I can use to bring myself back to this world, this textural landscape, whenever I need to feel that connection with people that this game so masterfully evokes.