![]() It’s easily the most complex walking simulator out there, though, because unlike those other games Death Stranding is concerned with the actual walking part. The term “walking-sim” has been used a lot to talk about story-driven games where walking around is all you do, but Death Stranding has made that phrase redundant. I think it’s deliberate, but I found it jarring and it came across like they wrote the story, got Norman Reedus to record his lines, then redid a whole bunch of the story but couldn’t get Reedus back in to do it. He’d become silent, not uttering a word even when the situation called for it. One weird thing that bothered me is how Sam would sometimes go strangely quiet. And by the end, everything wraps up quite well with the majority of questions being answered, and a few strands left dangling, presumably for a sequel. It was the cinematic flair and great acting that helped keep me invested in a story which I would have otherwise probably skipped through. And I certainly can’t knock the performances and directing, both of which are nothing short of excellent. Likewise, I enjoyed learning more about Fragile, and watching the relationship between Sam and his BB progress. In particular, a character called Mama has an interesting narrative strand. Having said that though, there are certainly some great moments and smaller plot threads that I found to be terrific. Overall, I can’t say I’m a fan of the story. Most of the narrative meat is wedged into the opening and closing hours of Death Stranding, and that can make the middle feel like a long slog of near non-stop delivering. There’s also a pacing problem wherein the middle 20+ hours doesn’t have a lot of big story advancements. What Kojima is in need of is a talented editor who can trim and shape his writing. ![]() I can kind of see that, but truthfully I think he’s much more guilty of using a lot of words to say very little. I’ve seen people describe Kojima’s dialogue as Shakesperian. Things often get repeated, too, in some cases with three or four characters telling you the same thing one after the other. The dialogue is often awkward and stilted, making it hard to connect with any of the characters. ![]() We hand out Likes to people we’ve never even met, and then forget about them again.Īs much as I personally love the gameplay in Kojima’s games I’ve always struggled to enjoy his writing, and that’s perhaps even more so the case in Death Stranding. It’s a fun commentary on the state of the world, on how we’re more connected than ever in some ways despite the distance, and yet often isolated. Your efforts are given “Likes” by the other characters and even other players, and for the most part you never meet the majority of NPCs, instead you only talk to them through holograms. The overarching themes in play are of connection, but there’s more to that. In other words, you’re going to be racking up the miles and spending a lot of time lost in your own thoughts. ![]() Many of the smaller prepper shelters need convincing to sign up, which means doing deliveries for them, too. Exactly how something so utterly boring wound up being so utterly absorbing is a mystery.Īs Sam you’ve been given a task: reconnect America by trudging from place to place, making deliveries and hooking them up to the Chiral Network in order to form new connections and allow the sharing of information and more. In this 40+ hour game the majority of your time will be spent going back and forth, delivering parcels. Chiral printing lets them create a lot of what they need, but there’s also a plenty of stuff that still needs to be transported the good old fashioned way: on Sam’s back. As Sam Porter Bridges you are a courier, tasked with lugging cargo of all types across a bleak post-apocalyptic world where the majority of people are hunkered down in bunkers. It’s like Kojima only just discovered them, and after completing a few in other games branded them the greatest thing in the history of videogames ever and built an entirely new game around them. In the case of Death Stranding however, the entire game is a seemingly never-ending series of fetch quests. The classic fetch quest is a staple of gaming, typically found in RPGs that want to pad out their length by sending players scurrying back and forth carrying useless tat.
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