Death Stranding

I'm still not a Viking but I'm not in Control, either.

As previously reported, I wrapped up the video game Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, where you play as a Viking rampaging across Great Britain, a couple of months ago.  In late June, I completed the supernatural action-adventure game Control, and was wondering what to play next.

As it turns out, the next game was Death Stranding, the latest from video game auteur Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear series).  It was one of the weirdest games I've ever played.

Death Stranding is set in some sort of post-apocalypse and you play as a porter who's job is to carry massive amounts of cargo on his back from one outpost to another.  For some reason, you have a human fetus in an incubation chamber strapped to your chest which, for some reason, can sense the presence of invisible supernatural monsters called "BTs." The porter character is played by Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead, so that's cool.  Other characters are played by Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, and Lindsay Wagner, as well as film directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Hideo Kojima has made no secret that he wants to work in movies, and in addition to Hollywood stars and directors, his games all have a cinematic feel to them and are characterized by extended "cut scenes," sequences that play out like film or video that require no interaction by the player.  The last two hours of Death Stranding are virtually one long sequence of cut scenes interspersed only by some periodic travelling by the Reedus character, and includes one 32-minte cut scene that I saw listed somewhere as the second-longest cut scene in all of video game history.

I don't mind long cut scenes as long as they're good and Kojima produces among the very best - they're not unlike watching a movie or tv episode.  But I must admit that some of the closing scenes in Death Stranding, which consisted mainly of exposition by various characters trying to explain the metaphysics behind elements of the preceding game play, got a little tedious.  I don't care about the sci-fi theory concocted about mass extinctions and the afterlife as long as I get to battle a levitating blue whale with a plasma gun that shoots ammo made from my character's blood.  

But that criticism aside, it was a fascinating, wildly original, and involving game.  In the past 30 days, I managed to log some 148 hours of game play.  That's the 11th most hours for my games, right there between Borderlands 2 (160 hours) and No Man's Sky (141 hours).

The game at times is spooky and suspenseful, and Mads Mikkelsen in particular presented an intimidating and malevolent opponent.  But gameplay actually was not particularly difficult.  In fact, I checked the settings a couple of times during the game to make sure the "Difficulty" setting wasn't set at "Easy" for some reason and not "Normal."  My character survived most combat and other violent encounters, although he was roughed up at times and dragged across the landscape.  In fact, like other Kojima, stealth-style games, Death Stranding isn't a "shooter" style game, and trying to kill your enemies, either human or supernatural, was rarely a winning strategy - the game rewards hiding until the enemy passes and simply running away is usually the best solution. My "kill count" at the end of the game was exactly "zero," while in other games my character is technically a mass murderer, credited with dozens, if not hundreds, of deaths.

Death Stranding is a single-player game, but it cleverly simulates multi-player action.  For example, instead of "bonus points" or "XP," you level up by earning "likes" from other, unseen players for completing missions and building infrastructure like bridges and shelters.  And you keep coming across cargo "dropped" by other players that you can recover and later deliver for "likes," and if you drop cargo, unseen other players may recover and deliver it for you (depending on your number of "likes").  But the other players are actually just part of the game program and although you encounter many NPCs, you never actually encounter another player.

There are Easter eggs and homages galore throughout the game, both to cinema and to other games.  I probably missed a lot of the gaming references, although there was an abundance of not-at-all-subtle nods to Cyberpunk 2077, including direct references to Cyberpunk character Johnny Silverhand.  After all of the negative publicity that Cyberpunk suffered, it's nice to see some loving fan-boy adoration for the game.

The game has replay potential, meaning I'm not at all unwilling to play it through again, but not just yet.  I bought Death Stranding in a discount bundle with a bunch of other games during a Steam sale, so I'm going to change the pace a little bit for August before schlepping some more cargo across post-apocalyptic, Death Stranding America.