SWAT 5 but instead of copaganda its a Francis Bacon painting with a biopunk filter. This shit is the most arresting video game I've played since...I don't know when. I really hate to throw this in the 'needs a write-up' pile but there's so much to gush about here. The instant quotables ("I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for, in an organizational sense."), that OST, the gunplay that perfectly emulates the old skool tacticool FPS games, the level design, the secrets (did you know there's an additional hard mode that has rare enemies, new sections, & additional targets?!), the implants, the cryptic but emotionally evocative storytelling, both the LIFE and the Entrapment cutscenes, and just the whole indescribable aesthetic of the game. I've seen and experienced a lot of media that takes comfort in being dark, disdainful, and dreary, and indeed have the same emotional arc as this, but none do it with the quite the same balance of levity, futility, mania and malice like Cruelty Squad does.

Edit: So I saw that the dev retweeted this excellent video review of the game, which touches upon the actual themes of this game, which is something I neglected to mention in my gushing here.

I'm not a big Bataille fan, but this game inspired me to take a second look at his work, particularly the Accursed Share, and I'm finding his words increasingly compelling. There's something so...accurate about the way Bataille describes capitalistic societies as being excessive growth & energy without any tension release. The "growth" of Capital, and the resulting inequality, is like an endless edging session that has turned the temporary delay of gratification into an eternal permanence of longing, a longing of gratification that is never coming (haha penis). Gone are the days of the potlach, Bataille notes, in which inequality was solved in a cathartic day of gift-giving and redistribution ( and maybe some orgies ;) ); what we have instead in capitalistic societies is that the wealth is concentrated into luxuries, with redistribution being only done "as necessary" through welfare. The excess & inequality is entrenched in the capitalistic system.

What gives me hope, and what gave Bataille hope, and what ultimately Cruelty Squad is hoping for, is that the growth will overflow at some point. A potlach is just a sexier, voluntary revolution--one of the capital P Points of The Accursed Share is that the excess growth in any economy must be dealt with; the problem with capitalistic societies is that the recursive spending on luxury and the restrictive spending on welfare isn't really dealing with the issue of growth. The excess growth, if never dealt with, will spawn its own revolutionary growth that'll find itself amongst society's most spited and downtrodden. For Bataille (and for me), this was American Descendants of Slavery; for Cruelty Squad, it's the gig worker. It's not just some 'le random xd' moment that Cruelty Squad Man begins his journey waking up from a depression nap in his small weak-ass apartment; it's recognition that the revolution will find its strongest energy in the depressed, the marginalized, the unlucky, and the unloved. The final text of Cruelty Squad is a quote from Bataille emphasizing the inevitability of this revolutionary energy; this era will collapse or it will burst, whichever comes first.

And after that?

G O L D E N A G E

Few people in this industry (or any industry, mind you), are so commited to constructing so complicated narrative paths and rythms, in order to tell the most naive and sincere emotions about human connection.

Won't ever understand those who insist on labelling Kojima as a frustrated filmmaker who turned to videogames and doesn't care about the gameplay. He has proven himself time and time again on both fronts, and Death Stranding's gameplay is inseparable to his aspirations with the game as a whole. Incisive, complex and reaching for new grounds.

The final credits come to an end, with the names of the other porters that have aided you on your journey. There's so much stuff you've built together without realizing.

Some thoughts that I had stuck in my head:
Explore the world looking for a solution, a connection. Together. Maybe not physically, not by the same routes, maybe not delivering the same

It is difficult for Death Stranding to reach you playing it alone. Its nature emerges more easily online, and it's a great gesture and a statement of intent that you don't need a subscription to ps plus.

Kojima presents a digital world that is difficult to interpret and unite in words, a fiction that shoots directly into our reality.
Cursed, heartfelt, but also emotional. embrace the connections between things, but question them. a celebration of human duality
More prophetic than MGS2 and with better observation, generalizing and at the same time specifying the difficulties of our day to day, articulating them in the total art of videogames.
From the most abstract to the most literal, collective fears, traumas and very recognizable memories materialized. Visible, audible, and even palpable in an alien America full of dualities, of people who only intuit and show themselves through holograms and numbers.
But we are here. Maybe not next door, but in the same world. And the proof is the ladder that I have used to create an improvised bridge, I have left it here, for you, for me, for everyone. And that rope on the cliff, that capsule, that package on the ground. We are here.

Where the rejection of what forces us to leave this world is manifested in a kind of allergy for those who are more akin to these fears or have experienced them to the limit.
Where people are baptized for their present, for their office and condemned for their past. Where the heroes deliver packages and letters. They come to our futuristic shacks and install an esoteric Internet.
Everything is Sam Porter Bridges, whose name makes it STRONGLY EVIDENT what Death Stranding is about, and at the same time no, you cannot perfectly encompass anything as complex as earthly and afterlife connections, the natural and the mechanical, the Software and the Hardware, the "Ka" and "ha". reality and dreams. Much of Death Stranding's recontextualized iconography seems to suggest that.

It is a work that calls for thinking in an unprecedented way about it, because it offers an unprecedented reinterpretation of the transition and relationship with our environment, especially for gaming standards, obsessed with the mechanical-narrative relationship or the challenge, the suggestion and the satisfaction as a criterion to generate interpretations that are autopsies or descriptions. That in the best case.
At worst you have Far Cry 3.
Every species has the game in different facets and areas as a form of intellectual and emotional connection.
Children play and learn/relate, animals play to understand each other. We play to replace war.

Even before having sex we played.

Homo ludens. And Kojima welcomes a lot of this.

We need to be playful without losing focus.
There is no need for subtlety, just answer honestly to human questions. Use the forms of play as a response to the bitter obstacles of reality.
The example is the "Social Strand System", a mechanical reinterpretation of social networks where the game of deliveries and recovery of packages, manufactures and constructions has an impact on likes and statistics, but also on turning the environment into something more livable and peaceful, at the same time, shows that a more altruistic and ethical form of social interaction is possible.
It sounds naive to say that the reconstruction of the collective environment in an online video game is a lesson in altruism and community, even more so when there are likes involved, but the exercise of life begins somewhere, and now that we are waking up from this techno delirium -competitive utopian in which social networks had us flooded, now that we know how important they are to connect with each other more than to raise our ego, this "Social Strand System" shines more than in 2019.
Through the textures of slow gaming, an experiment of self-knowledge and updating is proposed, there is the unprecedented, in how the game confronts us with situations without necessarily connecting their thoughts or ideas and still achieving a certain cohesion. As in life, no one knows "what it is about" and yet we walk through it with what we own and what others leave for us.
And for a game that wants to embrace these themes without giving up the nature of its medium, its foundation, it's something really admirable.
-------------------
Not a single day goes by that I don't think about Death Stranding. Perhaps because of what has been happening in the world since 2020.
On arrival at Port Knot City.
How the corpses of people who have left explode, leaving an emotional and physical void in the form of a crater. Cities with people locked up, invisible. In the networks. In their inverted rainbows. How work becomes playing with its dozens of tools to transport, how enemies are my reflection, silence, likes, photos, stories... In life, how life can be everywhere.
And I can't even put into words practically anything that this game is for me. I plan to return to it in 2023 now that a sequel has been announced that begs the question: Should we have Connected?

okay, so a couple of things right off the bat that i think will discount this criticism for a lot of people but regardless feel like they should be mentioned. first, this is the first metal gear game i've ever completed. i've played a bit of mgs1, i've played a bit of peace walker, a bit of mgs4, and a very little bit of mgs3. i never had a playstation until i got a ps3 in high school and didn't want to just jump into mgs4 on the platform, and found myself really frustrated by the stealth gameplay of mgs1, though most of these complaints are things i have since moved past and have been wanting to play these masterpieces quite a bit (though with only a mac and a ps4 it's hard to get yr hands on the main series these days). the other thing that i think will discount some of this for people is that my completion rate currently sits at 49% complete. i've done the entire story, including missions 45 and 50, done quite a few side ops, and collected a decent amount of intel and such, but the rest of the mission tasks, side-ops, wildlife, developments, etc. will have to wait as i slowly chip away at them for the next few years.

WITH ALL THAT SAID i absolutely loved my time with this one (all 77 hours of time). kojima is pretty clearly influenced by cinema in all his work, and it is on full display in this game. the way that cutscenes are interwoven into the gameplay, allowing some player control at times and at other times creating these unbelievable compositions that are fully expressive through the game engine, it's an undeniable experience. i feel this aspect of the game gets even better in the "post-game" as all of the side characters get brought to the forefront, and their endings are all displayed in the most melodramatic and gorgeous fashions. this even extends to all the little details that i saw someone on reddit derisively described as "time wasters" such as: the helicopter intros to missions, the on land or helicopter exfiltrations, the credits at the end of each mission, etc. all of this stuff creates a richly constructed world and immerses the player within all of the processes that are required to make the gameplay possible (whether that be giving an intro to snake arriving at his destination or showing the player what labour goes into creating the thing that they are playing). it allows this game to play like almost nothing else, and to me (as more of a cinematic thinker) makes this game reach to the heights of expression that cinema can achieve.

the gameplay here is obviously amazing, a kind of proton-breath of the wild with how open every objective is, how anything can be accomplished in whatever way the player wishes and there's so many different options to experiment with. it makes it so even at it's most brutally annoying (for me, the mechanized unit in mission 45) it makes the player want to continually try again and again to until the moment where it all just clicks. there's so much more to say just about the gameplay here, but it's also already been thoroughly praised by almost everyone else in the eight years since this game came out.

what is easily the most hotly contested part of this game is the narrative itself. i won't be able to make any comparisons to the other games, as previously mentioned, but i've heard they're all masterpieces so if this is supposed to be the worst one it's clear that those other games must be some of the greatest experiences ever made. what we have here is more expressive than it is coherent, much like some of my favourite films (southland tales, mulholland drive, etc.). there's so much that is explained here but at the same time it feels like it can never be truly understandable. grim nihilistic militarism, organizations created with no ideology except blind devotion to themselves. paranoia and revenge are the only ways forward but even that brings more destruction than it can ever bring peace. kaz constantly looking for spies until he becomes completely consumed with delusions, ocelot drawing further and further away until it's never really clear what he wants, snake seemingly just doing what he believes he should be doing even if he never really knows why he's doing it. even skull face seems hellbent on world domination just because he wants to sow more hell than ever really getting anything from it. the one character that feels like they're able to transcend the constant downward spiral is quiet, who learns the power of forgiveness in a world where it seems to mean so little, and sacrifices herself for a friend in what is one of the most affecting scenes in the entire game.

lot of other little moments i loved here (the ashes, sahelanthropus, the rain into the rainbow, the truth, etc.) but in all honesty i just loved playing something so willingly obtuse and full of questions while also being so endlessly replayable with one of the best gameplay loops i've ever experienced. guess i should finally finish death stranding soon lmao