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?
