We will republish this article from April 2022. Death Stranding release on PC Game Pass (opens in new tab).
I recently started reading Hideo Kojima’s books. creative genes (opens in new tab), a collection of essays by the designer on a variety of pop culture topics: reissues of his favorite childhood cartoons, reviews of new science fiction novels, and retrospectives of great films. As anyone interested in Kojima’s work would expect, this is a book that veers between keen insight and tedious navel-gazing. On the page, the eye jumps to the next paragraph.
The book is a grab bag of essays with no real throughlines, but with the theme of loneliness. When Kojima writes about a particular topic, he tends to tie it to several periods in his life, some of which are described in great detail. It’s full and how Kojima thinks about a particular piece is tied to his first experience in the context of his own life. Kojima does not hesitate to add references to his own highly successful works.
It was the perfect setting to embark once again on Death Stranding’s journey across the inhospitable landscape of the near future.Death Stranding: The Director’s Cut adds many new elements to the game (more on Have a look at this). (opens in new tab)), but this seems mostly backloaded, and the first 12 hours or so are familiar from the first playthroughs at launch.
However… the real world is a little different. Death Stranding was released in his November 2019. A month later, a new virus outbreak was detected in Wuhan, China, and within months nearly the entire world went into some form of coronavirus-related lockdown.
“The world is designed so that Sam rarely sees another human in the flesh.”
Let’s not overdo it here, but like everyone else, I spent the two and a half years I spent mostly at home. I now live in a world where I don’t even notice plastic screens at supermarket checkouts. I don’t mind passing dozens of masked people on my walk around town, and sometimes kids have to come home from school and jam. A swab on the nose.
Everyone has gone through some version of this. And what Kojima realized about our society, and what is at the core of Death Stranding, was sharply magnified through this lens. We’ve gone through the spell that the deliveryman could be our only face-to-face contact for the week, and as Larkin wrote in Aubade, “a postman like a doctor.” go from house to house.”
Parts of Death Stranding now land differently. The world is designed so that Sam rarely sees another human in the flesh outside of a cutscene. The majority of deliveries are made to functional industrial style bunkers, appreciated by holographic projection and sent in new. delivery. There are CODEC calls, but Sam is almost always alone, except he’s BB in the vast landscape.
I’m pretty good at Death Stranding now because I’ve already played it. One of its great elements is that this is actually a game about thinking rather than a skill-based game in difficulty. I approach deliveries with patience, planning, proper equipment and a bit of knowledge. should have done first).
And while I was slowly walking with my luggage on my back like a forklift, I was thinking about the exchanges that Kojima Productions had made. I forgot at first that Sam can shout into the hills. “Like” activated it: Now, just like when I’m taking a walk, I sometimes talk to myself.
“Thematically at least, ‘DEATH STRANDING’ is at its weakest when traditional elements are added later.”
In this world, almost everything is natural to begin with. The human structure that exists is a disparate brutal blotch on the landscape, gnawed at the edges by plants. Begin your long trek up the mountain, confident that you won’t bump into anyone else on the way. Half the time you forget BB is even there: until you start to goof off with “soothing” interactions, see the spectacular scenery and feel guilty if you don’t treat BB to photo mode.
I think the arc of Death Stranding can be explained by Sam being an outcast who eventually becomes the common chain that binds the various groups together. But the power of this game doesn’t come from its pretty conclusion. It comes from the fact that Sam is this lonely outsider figure for the most important part of your experience. Later addition of traditional elements such as shooting sections and more regular “combat” encounters makes it the weakest.
Kojima explores how the lifestyles of advanced societies drive us into isolated groups, and how that leads to collective inability to deal with existential threats like global warming. But it seems to me that what happened in the real world during the pandemic made Death Stranding’s underlying atmosphere of loneliness the most prominent part of the experience.
I had an interesting experience the other day. I live in a semi-rural area and have to walk over muddy hills to the nearest store. I carried it all in my backpack and reweighted the straps when I got back.
It also made me think of something else. In Kojima’s book The Creative Gene, he wrote an essay about a taxi driver in which he described how he identified with Travis Bickle.
“But it wasn’t the story, the direction, or the technique of the actors that brought tears to my eyes. Because I knew
“I’m not the only one who thinks he’s alone! A man who feels as lonely as I do is driving a taxi. Thinking so, my loneliness subsided.
“After the movie ended, I bought the same military jacket that De Niro wore for the performance, put on leather boots and hit the town. I stooped and walked with a slouch.” Walking down the street as Travis, something seemed to change. Taught me how to keep it.
Moments of imaginative empathy, big or small, seem to be the perfect thing for games and movies to leave behind. You have to accept that it beats you up. A moment of loneliness in the world, and whatever we stubbornly walk through.
