One Happy Team...

And just like that, we’re thrown into World War 1 trenches. With a few lethal weapons, finally. The standard fare: pistol, assault rifle, shotgun. We also meet Mads Mikkelsen character, whom we see in BB’s interludes. He cosplays Apocalypse Now. It’s a nice boss fight, were he summons WW1 soldiers, and you need to beat him a couple of times before you’re teleported back.

Then we meet Mama (Margaret Qualley). She had a stillborn dauther, and now she’s attached to that ghost-child.

That’s why she cannot leave the compound. She also has a twin sister, Lockne, and the child is actually her’s, Mama was a surrogate mother. She asks Sam to sever the cord, so she could travel and see her sister, but when she does, turns out Mama was dead all along, but now she finds her peace, reunited with Lockne.

Lockne’s eyes also change color: one remains yellow, one turns blue, like Mama’s.

That’s all very imaginative, if only the episode wouldn’t be so boring. At one point you have to deliver Mama all across the map, 10km of rough terrain, some 20 minutes of real time.

In the 3rd act your bike is taken away, but you finally get fast-travel between cities and also leg exoskeleton, which allows you to carry more and run faster. So it’s not all bad. Later, you also get antigrav sledges. Those are impressive, as you can chain two together, and drag them like a locomotive you are.
In a game not about shooting, a bolo rifle is incredibly effective. Let me explain. Your only enemies are MULEs, your tribal human, armed with spears. They can throw spears at you, but not overly accurate, and they can try to tackle you on melee. Bolo rifle shoots in a wide arc, and incapacitates any mule in a single shot. It also carries plenty of ammo. Once depleted, you can usually find more in mule camps, or you can just carry a couple of those. As a result, Sam can take out an entire MULE camp if needed. Later you also get a gun that can steal enemy cargo and a gun that’s effective only against monsters and uses blood bags as ammo. It’s inventive, true. But I’d just prefer a conventional arsenal, honestly.

There are a lot of motives: bonds, knots, bridges, strands, “make us whole again”, “I’ll be waiting for you on the beach, come and find me”. Still no idea what any of that means.

There’s a boss fight, but you don’t have conventional weapons yet, only grenades. Luckily, it isn’t very hard, although the boss can instakill you if you aren’t careful.

Boss is summoned by Higgs, who’s the leader of a terrorist group. Once one of the monsters devours a human, it results in an explosion, and Higgs orchestrates those events.

Every time Sam rests we’ve shown some memories from the perspective of the baby in the artificial womb. We’re told not to worry about this, which means that either memories are important, or the memories we see aren’t the fetus we carry, but Sam’s own (which also means President is not his mother).

Sam is also carrying a photo which supposed to be of him, his mother and sister. But even although the face is smudged is not the face of Amelie, I suspect.

Death Stranding reminds me of scifi of the 70s, that leaned into weird and unknown. Here we have creatures invisible to most people that age everything they touch, and apparently people corpses not disposed properly exploding like a nuclear bomb.
There are some concepts that are mundane in cinema, but grounbreaking in games. Like body hair. Or tears. Nobody cares about those, except Kojima. But those are the most technologically advanced tears I’ve seen, and may yet see for many more years.
We play as Sam, a postapocaliptic porter. His last name is Porter as well. Sam has center of gravity and momentum. If he runs downhill, he’ll stumble and fall, and if his backpack is too heavy he’ll fall on his back.
Sam is also son of the last America president, who’s dying of cancer. One of your first tasks is to cremate her, so she doesn’t explode. Then your sister becomes the next president (not very democratic), but there’s a catch: she’s held by some organisation on the other side of the continent. And now it’s up to you to go and rescue her.
You’re given a BB, artifical baby in an artifical womb, that once connected, outlines the monsters, which you need to sneak by. Innovative, but not very convenient. Although that goes for the entire game.
The problem is that there isn’t much game to begin with. Or it’s like the most boring and mundane things were put into a single game. I always avoided online interactions in the Souls series. And here we have more of those: you supposed to share cargo with other players, and your currency is literally likes they give you. And the entire gameplay is just endless strings of fetch quests. Now I guess it all started with Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops, a low budget game for a portable console. So they had to make a lot of very small, self contained missions, and a ton of meta-management in between. Then we got Metal Gear Solid 5, which wasn’t small anymore, but still was an endless stream of stealth missions and meta-management. Now, you aren’t even given weapons at first. The first weapon you are given is a vial with your shower water you are supposed to throw at monsters like a grenade.
Avoiding online interractions, fetch quests and I’m sure later they’ll make you throw piss at enemies too. What you wouldn’t do to watch best cutscenes industry can produce?