Death Stranding. A Hideo Kojima game, by Kojima Productions. Written by Hideo Kojima, based on an idea by Hideo Kojima, designed by Hideo Kojima, coded by Hideo Kojima, pizzas provided by Kojima Catering. You'd think I'm kidding, and I am, but this dude puts his name absolutely everywhere, on the poster, the banner, the splash screens, the start credits, in collectibles, etc. His ego is next level, and since his name is all over the place, and everyone talks about it as a Hideo Kojima game, I can't ignore it.
You can feel this in the pretentious writing, and the fact that every important character is introduced on screen with his name and the name of the real life actor, that he claims to be a friend of, who portrays the character. Talk about immersion breaking! This man is obsessed with celebrities, and dreams himself as a movie director more than a video game creator. Why some people are such fans of his work is beyond me. Maybe it's because they played Metal Gear Solid when they were children and could not see how bad his writing is and got used to it? I've always felt that, if he does make fine games, this man is the most overrated video game personality of the industry.
So now that we've talked about the Hideo Kojima behind the "A Hideo Kojima Game Death Stranding TM Director's Cut", let's talk about the game!
Honestly, it's great on some aspects, but terrible on others.
First of all, the world building and the theme are absolutely amazing. I love it. But if the idea of the world that was created is great, the writing however alternates between bad and terrible. It takes itself so seriously that it's laughable at times. Most dialogues are so cringe and feel like they've been written by a teenager for his drama class ("I'm Fragile, but I'm not that fragile"). I can tell that they think it's deep but it's honestly not. As always with a Kojima game, there are so many cutscenes, so many convoluted dialogues that clearly think they're philosophical but they are just really obnoxious.
Also, I have to talk about it: even if it's not as blatant as in his Metal Gear Solid games, Kojima's sexism is still there in his portraying of women characters. All women are presented as mothers, sexy scientists, fragile (literally the name of one of the main characters), or wearing high red heels, you name it. And we still have the mandatory zoom ins on certain body parts, but I'm sure it's for the sake of story-telling and art!
I cannot care for any of the characters, even though they talk so much, and I'm sure we're supposed to be sad when things happen to them, but I feel nothing. I just finished the Insomniac Spider-Man games, and the writing was so much better and emotional without the writers thinking to themselves they're geniuses and I actually cried at the end there. Not in Death Stranding. It's so pretentious that it's just listening to itself instead of speaking to its players.
I really have trouble understanding the motivation of these people. They want to rebuild America. Why? What would that bring in this world? Why, as they keep saying it, would rebuilding America rebuild the world? I mean...
As much as I like Norman Reedus, his character is such a cliché it's hard to care for him. The overused grizzled loner with a heart of gold archetype who refuses the call to adventure only to accept it five minutes later is really tiresome.
What is funny to me is the dissonance between how serious the game takes itself, and the ridiculous immersion-breaking things we can find in it. I already talked about the names of the actors displayed in the cutscenes when they appear. There's also the main character literally showing us things at the camera when he's in his private room (maybe there is an explanation for that at the end of the game, but honestly I don't know if I will hold until getting there), the Half Life, Cyberpunk 2077, etc. unlockable customizations for your character, the God of War references because it's a Sony production as well as the giant platform thing from Horizon Zero Dawn for the same reason that you can literally see in-game when you're walking around.
Talking about walking, let's dive into the main mechanic of the game.
I think it's brilliant. I really do. Since it's basically the only thing you do here, they've put it all in. Yes, it can be sometimes quite ridiculous to be carrying a giant tower of stuff on your back, or a person strapped like a salami with just his head showing from inside the bag, but it really feels like we are carrying these heavy loads, from the animations to the controls themselves in your hands (however, the control scheme is atrocious, with almost every control you use the most relying on you holding the tiniest buttons of the controller all the time, and the menus are the worst menus I've seen in a while, so convoluted and difficult to spot what you're actually looking for).
Clearly, the best part of the game is planning ahead, looking for solutions on how to get to your destination in an inhospitable environment. The feeling to finally get there and deliver your cargo is really cool. Getting out of your vehicle under the rain to finish on foot, putting a ladder here, a rope there, for others to use too feels great and rewarding in itself.
By the way, another great component of the game is this actually. Other players, other porters like you, can use the things you leave behind, and you can use theirs. The game relies only on a "Like" mechanic, where you give Likes to other players when you use their stuff, and you can manually give them more if you want, and you get them too. This system is just a reward in itself, as these likes give you nothing else than this, the feeling to have helped others. This ties perfectly with the theme of the game: making connections/reconnecting with others. And you really feel that with this. You never see them, but you know they were there, and you are part of a greater whole.
However, if I find the traversing enjoyable in the challenges it presents to you, and I get the whole thing about making connections, etc. The execution makes it tedious, really fast. The fact that you have to do so many literal fetch quests all the time is so repetitive and boring. By that I mean that the first time you get somewhere through the main story, discover new environments and challenges, feels amazing. But then the main story makes you do 10 other meaningless deliveries in-between that bring nothing but repetition and boredom. And there is so much grind in this game it's insane. If you want to build any important structure, you need so much, and I mean SO MUCH, material. I get that you're supposed to be doing it all with other players contributing, I get the message and the theme alright, but it still takes way too much time. And did they ever think about when there are not so many players anymore, like now for instance? The whole thing becomes such a grindy chore I pretty much burned out on it.
And since that's the whole gameplay loop, after 26 hours already of going back and forth to deliver pizzas (literally, some deliveries are that), even though I genuinely acknowledge the brilliant moments of the game and would like to see the end of the story to get some answers, when I realized I was only a third through it, the controller kinda felt from my hand and I don't know if I want to pick it up again.
As a working father, I don't have as much time as I used to to play games anymore, and I really have a thing with games not respecting my time now. And Death Stranding doesn't.
