I think a lot of people overlooked this game when it came out. "Postapoc package delivery simulator" isn't the most action-packed elevator pitch, many people are willing to write off KojiPro's style as "just wackiness", and of course it came out in The Year of Endless Bangers 2019 and was competing for attention with many other stellar titles. People I know who did try it often bounced off fairly quickly after experiencing the initial difficulty of movement.
I implore you: go back. Give it another look. Let it sit and infuse slowly into your being like an herbal tea. Take breaks and return to it over the course of months. Hike up a cliff just to rest at a cairn made by a stranger and admire the view they curated for you. Play a little song on your harmonica. Build something that will help someone you'll never meet.
Death Stranding is a fantastic and beautiful game but it's also unavoidably ephemeral. Although it has many brilliant aspects—an unparalleled tactility of motion and mechanics, a cinematic eye for cutscenes that puts most AAA games to shame, a plot that (in true Kojima form) uses the aesthetics of America to joyfully eviscerate its reality—the soul of the game and its most unique innovation is the way you play with other people. This is the first substantive iteration on cooperative asynchronous multiplayer since Demon's Souls, and it totally reframes the way you approach play.
Death Stranding's world is a hostile one by default, in which mere movement from one place to another is difficult and uncertain. As you progress through the game, you unlock more and more structures to make this traversal easier, but even the most powerful lategame structures are limited both by the game's geography and by the hard cap on "chiral bandwidth"—roughly the total number of buildings you can create in a region. So you inevitably rely on structures built by other players popping into your world (like messages or bloodstains in a Souls game).
For a thoughtful and warmhearted player, this immediately raises the question: if these structures are helping me, how can I best create structures that help others? And so the fundamental mode of interaction with the world shifts from the local optimization of your own success to a global, prosocial optimization of everyone's world. You'll never know for sure if this climbing anchor or that bridge was placed as best it could be, but every time you get a Like from another player you'll know you helped out.
But this interpersonal infrastructure won't be around forever. It relies on continued server support from Sony, who shut down the servers for Demon's Souls in 2018—not even 10 years after they launched. Metal Gear Solid V, KojiPro's last game as a Konami sub-studio, had its servers shut down this year after only seven years up. Death Stranding is on year three now, and while I hope that the newly-independent status of the studio will give them leverage to keep it around longer, it's impossible to say for sure.
So get while the getting's good and play it soon. Give yourself a chance to interact not just with the game but with the people. And if you play it on PS5, send me your ID so I can add you as a Bridge Link!
and that's why it absolutely whips ass.