surely you've heard of death stranding, hideo kojima's game about delivering packages to the world and changing the space you travel semi-permanently.
but... is it actually the first strand game? NO!!!
ENTER VANGERS.
vangers is a Russian PC game from 1998 which, for the most part, defies description. you play as a car-person who runs quests and races through a post-human, post-apocalypse biopunk society.
quick overview of the setting: earth, humans, and life as you know it are gone. in a genocidal war against a hive-mind alien species, humanity does a "genetic intrusion" and reduces all living creatures, themselves included, of the "chain of worlds" - planets connected through wormhole-like gates, detailed in the same developer's later game perimeter - into a biological sludge. over many years, new and super fucked-up looking dudes crawl out of the goop and begin to create their own societies. most of them worship the larva of the alien hive-mind, which survived below the planet crust and continue to transmit pheromones to a species that no longer exists.
the core loop is relatively simple. you drive from a top-down perspective on a semi-cylindrical map (toroidal, technically, although getting past the mountains at the top/bottom of every map is usually pretty tough) visiting cities, buying cars and parts, and collecting junk. other AI drivers also bup around on this map and do trading and so on. each map has a unique day/night cycle which feeds into a "race event"; for example, in the first map, you must deliver wriggling larva to their mucus-filled holes to the north so they can mature.
complicating this is a whole ecosystem of AI vehicles, ranging from tiny swarmers you can fender-bender to explode to rocket-slinging murdertrucks. every time you kill one of them, the less the others bother you; alternatively you can simply avoid them. one of many things that elevates vangers, and a key part of why it's a "strand game", is that your battles (or races, or runs) with these AI vehicles will semi-permanently (until next session) deform the landscape, opening up new shortcuts or making certain roads unusable bc of craters or holes.
when you make it to a city, you are given a relatively basic dialogue/trade interface. however:
- there are many non-dialogue interactive secrets, depending on your location
- the NPCs are some variant of freaky bug creature, rendered in a style similar to old soviet bloc claymation movies
- all dialogue uses slang and future terms that you have to learn, and NPCs can and WILL lie to you about what words mean, or what you should watch out for.
while you start with no goal, the eventual quest is revealed as you work through the chain of worlds and ingratiate yourself with its residents: to reconnect the disparate worlds, cross cultural boundaries, and reunify them into a coherent society.
i would encourage you to play it (there is a modern port to steam supported by the original devs and the game's extended community, linked above, which includes an HD version). it's a wonderfully weird game, incorporating cool bits from a wide array of genres to create a wholly unique synthesis.