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 the reality that its online functionality may one day shut down is kind of terrifying
you should absolutely play it sometime. hell, i should replay it sometime. maybe on stream or something. the Director's Cut edition, with a bunch of extra shit added to the game, is only $23.99 on Steam right now; if you've got a PC, trust me, it's worth it
One thing that I think a lot of foreign players and critics have always struggled to reckon with when it comes to Japanese games of this ilk is this idea of systemic and mechanical oppression being both intentional and in service of some sort of greater point, experientially, thematically, or both. Or, to put it more starkly, there is a tendency for Japanese games that ask players to meet it halfway in some regard to be given less of the benefit of the doubt compared to, let's say, more culturally familiar peers that might engage in the same ethos for reasons both understandable and, at times, rather unfortunate. I've written about this before, but many of them are a lot more comfortable about asking the player to trust that this structure that isn't built in their favor is going somewhere. That somewhere might take time and genuine patience to get there, but any perceived imposition or inconvenience is in fact in service of something meaningful, that a lack of smoothness or empowerment is the exact opposite of a design failing as we've been conditioned to believe for so long.
A lot of games that were 6/10s or 7/10s at best during the PS1 and PS2 years fall into this category and while it is true that they're not going to be everyone's tastes, I think a lot of it also frankly comes down to a lack of literacy in this side of Japanese game history, as well as certainly a general failure to better localize and propagate it and its intended context in its original time, particularly when it comes to Japanese sandbox and open world games. In a lot of ways I see something like a Disaster Report in games like Death Stranding, somber and disempowering because those developers believed games can be, should be, deserve to be more. These are games that ask you to sign a contract waiving your right to be intrinsically catered to as the audience, that perhaps you as the player don't always know what's best or what you want from it until they've had their time to make their case.
It's an honesty in direction and creative aspiration I respect a lot when performed responsibly and is one of the reasons that drew me to work in that part of the industry in the first place. I never finished my time with Death Stranding for a lot of reasons, but I don't regret a minute of it, either. Some people described it at the time as like a prettied up PS2 game and maybe it only feels like that because much of the rest of the industry lost something after those days and has only begun to realize that in recent years when confronted with games like this that manage to be successful "despite" it all.
not to disrespect the main point of the previous posts but i would respectfully disagree with the claim that japanese games are the only ones which add stressful stuff to the experience.
the first thing i immediately thought of was Pathologic, this russian "walking simulator" that is also about a pandemic. the first half of the game is literally you buying food as you walk around this desolate city full of people doing random violence upon each other. it's an eerie game with strange dialog and it sticks with me for this reason.
but Death Stranding also has an unlikely cousin: Euro Truck Simulator 2. both Death Stranding and Euro Truck Sim 2 have similar premises -- you're transporting goods to places that need it and it's all about mastering the controls and terrain you're on (indeed, ETS2 fans are consistent in criticizing western game journalists for not bringing this connection up). both titles reward the player for knowing how to master movement and you also feel like you're part of the political economy, with Death Stranding literally being overtly political about how you're restoring the connections of the united states.
there's also survival horror games like Signalis that use stressors to add a more varied experience or gameplay flow. even titles like Darkest Dungeon deserve some mention, even if their formula is overused these days. hell, we should bring up the more traditional roguelikes like NetHack and the masterpiece platformer that is Spelunky 2. what about the korean projectmoon games like Lobotomy Corporation and the goddamn X-COM franchise. these titles are arguably "6/10 Titles That People Still Go Back To" because they involve such stressful things.
as Dwarf Fortress would put it, "Losing is fun." stressful stuff gives you high stakes and makes you want to keep going. whether it is controls, the events, narrative, or just games being a dick to you, there's something cathartic and powerful about overcoming what we would commonly refer to as "jank".
it's why i'm pretty sure people adore the Soulsborne and SaGa series, even if they are noticeably more offbeat than their counterparts. you lose because you have the freedom to lose, which leads you to be better at succeeding later on.
The reason games like these are stressful and oppressive is because they give you freedom. Player expression occurs when the players are up against the mechanic wall and they have to think things through. It's overwhelming not just because of how oppressive the systems are but because the player must actually think about the game design and exploit them in order to survive. Losing is fun because it makes your own personal victories cathartic.
if anything, what people would consistently think as 10/10 is very streamlined titles with zero varying experiences ala stressful events. the real issue is not "japanese video game literacy" (though it is a symptom) but rather the dogmatic "games should be as streamlined as possible". in assuming players want more formulaic approaches, aaa video games have completely eliminated any potential for player expression and personal experiences. skill trees and The Open World give an illusion that there's freedom to be had, but everyone more or less goes through the same experience.
this is why people get bored of aaa games very quickly, even though there's so many imo. they instinctively know that their expression is limited, exploration is the same chore, movement is just another means to an end etc. no one likes chores, what people want is interesting gameplay even if it's from a 6/10 game.
