3D shooters are a genre long and particularly afflicted with 'just so' game design; Half-Life popularized a reload mechanic where you tap a button and wait to have your gun refilled from a pool, and this became a defacto standard for no particular reason over not having reloading, or reloading that actually has gun magazine management, or dozens of other one off systems meant to represent a games ethos. Halo introduced a two-weapon system that, along side a nuanced weapon selection forced you to always accept a trade off, games without nuanced weapon selections copied it wholesale, usually resulting in defacto one weapon system because you really need to carry the M16 at all times to get anything done. Halo Infinite in turn has a sprint button with so little effect that you need a stopwatch to tell if it makes you faster- because Halo doesn't benefit from a sprint mechanic but Shooters Have Sprint. Helldivers is perhaps the only studio published 3D shooter in half a decade if not more where there is no 'just so' game design, from meat and potato mechanics like your gun's recoil being semi-deterministic to help you avoid the regular concern of friendly fire, and your gun being loaded from a small pool of disposable magazines, to fun details like running out of spawns but completing the mission objective still constituting a victory.

I was thinking, trudging joylessly over wet rocks through glacial streams, my controller making the sounds of a crying baby, that no game has ever made me feel this way before — this sad, of course, but this peculiar mix of weary and curious, of wanting to do something despite the crushing futility of it all. Kojima's bizarrely over-engineered menus and mundane mechanics are so expertly deployed to elicit exactly this paradox, it is no wonder the game is so divisive. The game-ness of the game is turned against you so as to add experiential weight to its surface thematics. And so continuing on this line of thinking no game has done this before (besides Shenmue), made its sadness manifest so physically in the body of the player. I came to realise no film or book or piece of music has either, and so maybe, just maybe this is a big deal. If we are looking to art to make sense of the moment of our own extinction event, then I can think of no better work than Death Stranding to thicken time, to underscore the heavy intensity of the world beyond the human, to remind us that a single rock could be the difference between the end of the world and another tomorrow.

Forget about the whole narrative of "Death Stranding is unique because no other developer would make a game about just walking across open world and doing deliveries." Anyone who thinks like that don't know a single thing about video games (also somehow doesn't know games like Euro Truck exists). The achievement of this game has nothing to do with how "novel" it is with its core theme or some bullshit.

Death Stranding is great because gameplay mechanics supporting the idea of doing deliveries are thoroughly and meticulously systematized and game-ified that their feedback loops are incredibly addicting, while also buttressing the core conceptual themes of connection, being alone and altruism. Kojima and his team made sure that fetch quests are fun not just because of the instant gratification of achieving grades at the end and people giving you likes, but because of your own planning before making the delivery and making sure you are going through your routes while in full understanding of your current resources. Once you begin to see the larger picture and build network of roads and ziplines, the game now becomes something else, testing you to be as efficient as possible, and rewarding you for being smart.

Kojima has always loved systemic gameplay, but he always understood how to balance it out to make sure it's manageable, localized and most importantly, exploitable. Death Stranding is no exception. The game's focus is in the systemic exploration, but unlike other emergent open world games and "immersive sims," Death Stranding is not about emergent experiences; it's about constantly dangling the carrot of "you can be even more efficient here." And it's damn good at amplifying that gameplay loop. But instead of the pursuit of efficiency diminishing the humanity of the narrative and the world, it makes it stronger because you are creating these "strands" tighter and tighter.