jwalkercat's review of Death Stranding: Director's Cut.

Disclaimer: This review is mostly about my specific experience with Death Stranding. I don't claim that any of my criticisms are objective, and some may come across as strange and unfounded. I apologise in advance for this. My review also assumes that you know the game, and may spoil some things. intro: Death Stranding was one of still very few titles that I actively followed the development of. I am normally far more interested in playing an older game that I think I will enjoy than getting invested in a product that may or may not even eventually release, let alone meet my expectations for it. Nonetheless, from when I started playing through the Metal Gear games in 2018, I was enough of a Kojima fan to care about his then-future title. In retrospect, I wish that I knew less about Death Stranding before playing it, and had not watched any trailers. I also wish that I had somehow been able to dodge general consensus on the internet when it released, but that's basically impossible I guess. Unfortunately, possibly due to my lofty expectations, I am left broadly disappointed in Death Stranding. I do genuinely think that I will continue to reflect about whether I should care about any video games currently in development as a result of my experience with Death Stranding. friction: I guess I'll start with my biggest issue with the game, which is that it completely failed to live up to how involved of a walking simulator it is. I mean walking simulator not as the derogatory genre of first person games featuring mostly holding W, but more akin to QWOP as in, the simulated act of walking itself. I guess I had assumed that step placement and weight distribution and elevation and gradient would all have a much greater impact on the gameplay experience than it does in the game. Elevation seems to just be snow or not, and I guess you take fall damage. Slope gradient is reduced to 4 states: normal, slightly taxing, stamina-draining, and too steep. Weight distribution has a seemingly nonexistent effect, besides just asking you to hold L2+R2 for the whole fucking game (by not de-incentivising that option, it becomes Best practice to do it constantly). And step placement matters least of all. DS opts for a standard character controller, meaning that you have no control over where Sam's feet end up, besides what general path they will walk on. I'm not going to lie that the above kind of crushed me when I discovered all of it in my first play session. I decided in my mind that the best term to describe it would be "friction". It was as if the act of playing Death Stranding was far more frictionless than I expected. Where I expected the friction to come from the traversal of terrain, you can broadly just point Sam in a direction and hold forwards and, as long as you don't fall off a cliff, you're fine. I spent my first ~15 hours never tilting the control stick all the way, resulting in Sam slowly walking everywhere, because I assumed that it was a safer way to play, and I respected the game too much to ever think that Sam could just run everywhere with 80kg on his back. When I found out that I was wrong, I felt like I just wasted hours of my time pretending that it was a better experience than it was. Instead of being a game about the physical act of hauling cargo over long distances, Death Stranding is about routing and "inventory" management, and about thematically connecting people together, and about dealing with foes, either BT or Mule. My experience, in turn, became about imposing restrictions on myself in order to try and make the game resemble something enjoyable to me. I endeavoured to never use the odradek to scan terrain, which later had exceptions in checking river crossings (since red depths are very hard to judge by eye), and in blocking Mule scanners when I unlocked that ability. I turned online mode off as soon as I realised its functions (I prefer my single player games to stay that way). I Never Ever built a structure, or a road, or upgraded anything besides the compulsory bridge in the first area. I also only used a trike for maybe like 4 drives total, about half way through the game when I wasn't sure if I was going to commit to only walking. After testing I decided that walking was what I was doing. I used 2 ladders ever, and 3 climbing anchors. Not as intentional, but I tried using a ladder "outside of the construction zone" which pissed me off, and then later an anchor I put down recoiled its rope into an inaccessible spot, which was different to where I left it, so I gave up on both of them entirely after that. I'm sure there are more small things, but those are the main ones. I did all of these things in an attempt to artificially inject friction back into my experience, which definitely did work, but it did make the game probably more frustrating; in particular dealing with either enemy type. enemies: The Unger sections were a slog to get through and my main thought about them is that, to me, they seem like a gross waste of work hours on what could have been just cutscenes. With that out of the way, basically I hated dealing with Mules and BTs and I think I would have enjoyed the game more if they weren't in it. The most painful part is that both have distinct stealth possibilities, but their awarenesses are way too high to use stealth in every encounter. BTs will see you if you breathe, which you can only avoid doing for so long, so every encounter became just slow crouch-walking between their aggrivated radii. After some point, I just rerouted around them whenever I encountered them, which was normally faster anyway. One time I let myself die to one to see what would happen, and a crater was left. I think that's a cool mechanic, permanent open world "damage". I did just reload my save though, since my cargo got damaged in the process of dying. Mules you can stealth if you're insane and spam reload save and memorise exactly what to do, which I did a couple of times (that's how I played basically all the metal gear solid games lol). But there's way more game pushback against stealth, as if Kojima only intended for action battle interactions with Mules, but then told the team to put in barebones stealth as a force of habit. All of the joy of stealth from metal gear is gone, which is maybe the saddest sentence I can think of to describe death stranding. I frequently found myself wishing I could explore the maps and encounter their enemies as Venom Snake instead of Sam, which was definitely exacerbated by the numerous similarities between death stranding and The Phantom Pain. inspiration: I'm sorry to put a paragraph solely about metal gear in a review of death stranding, but it's important context I think (Note that I haven't actually played through MG1 and 2 at time of writing). The Metal Gear series I think can be broadly thought of through the lens of iteration. Kojima was asked to take creative control of Metal Gear 1 after development had started, which, combined with the limited hardware of the MSX, led to one of the first stealth focused games, even if it wasn't originally supposed to be one. The formula was polished in MG2, then brought into 3D in MGS1, then somewhat expanded in length, playable characters, and story in MGS2, then in MGS3 the main focus was larger and more dynamic "rooms" in a natural setting, then MGS4 pushed the limits of a cinematic game. This leads us to Peace Walker, which I consider as somewhat of a reset for the series. Borrowing a lot of stuff from Portable Ops (non-Kojima spinoff), the aim seemed to be to condense the gameplay of MGS3 down to a handheld format (first reduction in computing power between entries), while introducing co-operative multiplayer elements and light base management via collection of resources during regular gameplay, which fed into the general goal of building a PMC. Ground Zeroes and TPP both had the broad goal of further refining the stealth action gameplay, primarily by converting the somewhat limiting movesets and rooms of older games into much larger sandbox maps with many more options and approaches for any situation. TPP obviously being the larger game had more features, such as the return of the base building, loadout selection prior to mission start, and traversal-focused missions, all of which return in Death Stranding. From my perspective as someone who played TPP 3 years ago, Death Stranding feels like a direct continuation of the Peace Walker lineage of Kojima games. It seems like Kojima started his new company, and in an effort to lower production costs and play things safer than what it seems Silent Hills would have been, he set out to reuse much of his knowledge and memory from the development of the Fox Engine and MGSV, which led to the games feeling very similar in UI, general plot motivation (to rebuild what was destroyed), pacing, map design, character control, modelling and motion capture, lighting, etc. etc. etc. This personally made me feel as if I was in some kind of uncanny valley between a Metal Gear sequel and a wholly original and separate game, which as previously mentioned, definitely drew attention to myriad ways that I personally prefer the gameplay of V to DS. And all of this is to not even touch on all of the subtle references, intentional or not, towards individual rooms, characters, bosses, plot points, etc. from past Metal Gear titles. Fuck Konami as always btw, just sad to think of what could have been. characters/plot/pacing: Ok so now I get to write about what I probably consider to be the weakest part of Death Stranding: its plot. I firmly believe that Kojima cannot write a story for a 40 hour game. The same was true for V, but at least it had smaller stories to follow, like the growth of D-Dog, so it could at least pace its cutscenes a little bit. Death Stranding has no such cutscenes, so you get a couple of cutscenes at the very beginning to give motivation, then 3 quarters through it remembers that it has to finish the story, so it just gets people to explain it to you, and gradually ramps up cutscene density until you're just watching a movie before it tells you to fuck off and walk back before you actually get closure. And even then, there are not actually many plot points or twists, so you just feel like you're wading through narrative malaise for most of the game, and then at the very end you just go, "oh that wasn't really a twist, it was more like someone actually explaining what happened finally". The characters feel broadly soulless, like they don't actually exist outside of their narrative purpose. That is the opposite of how I feel about most Metal Gear characters, who show their personality in their codec calls, and they reference outside events and tastes and experiences that at very least imply that they could be real people. Death Stranding world is so fucked that I guess they just all only care about their jobs, which seem to be mostly telling Sam to get off his ass constantly. Sam the mailman somehow feels less realistic than the supersoldier army dictator with a robot arm, at least to me. I guess it's impossible to make a character worse than Quiet, but she's the exception to the surprisingly well-developed military men and support crew of the MGS series. Die Hardman is nothing. Deadman is nothing. Unger is nothing. Heartman is at least a decent comedy character, I don't loathe him. And then we get to the female characters. Somehow, somehow, somehow, Kojima thought it was acceptable have the 5 female characters actually be 3 characters, since there are 2 pairs that are the same person, either literally, or supernaturally they end up in the same body, and think exactly alike, so there's really no distinction. Needless to say, the most character any of them get is "oh shit they are the same person", "oh shit is she a villain?", "oh shit she has a traumatic backstory". Insane that each of those is applicable to at least 2 situations. Like I don't really have much to say but just point at it and say, "look at this please". It speaks for itself for sure. Also there's no yaoi so like what the fuck Kojima. Not even a hint. Everyone is either straight or entirely uninterested in anyone. Metal Gear Rising Revengeance also had this issue, so I assumed it was specifically a Kojima staple, but I assumed incorrectly. connection: I guess at least Death Stranding has entirely new themes, rather than somewhat recycling any of metal gear's. A shame that they're so heavy handed and personally uninspiring. The most blatant one that practically screams in your face is about the merit of global connection, more specifically via the internet, and also the limitations/restrictions of that. There's also just basic "what does doing the right thing mean" morality, letting go of the past ( symbolically by killing ghosts lol), and some ecofascism/apocalypse theories. I can definitely see why someone might connect to all of these, but they just did nothing for me. I never felt like I was connecting people together, I felt like I was playing a video game that had every npc say "wow I love the internet". The act of playing seemed genuinely magical at the very start. I was able to imagine Sam as a real person who had to traverse real terrain, and I was just guiding him to do exactly what I would personally do in that situation. That was both really cool, but also maybe not for the best. Since with most games I play now, I immediately feel like I'm controlling a character who exists within the rules of a game (as opposed to when I first started playing games, and every playable character felt like a real entity), but also I think became the source of my frustration that the character controller wasn't accurate enough to sustain my imagination. This is why I just walked everywhere at the start, since that's what I would do if I was hiking with a large load. I never carried luggage that went above Sam's head, since I know that would make walking much harder in real life. I hated the odradek, since it doesn't actually exist yet. I didn't appreciate the lack of music randomly becoming a Low Roar song because if I was walking, I would either be listening to music the whole time, or not at all. And it doesn't make any sense to "gain" a song out of nowhere. As I'm writing this, I'm realising that some of my issues with the game weren't about my expectations, they were about the game tricking me at the start that it could be real. When that illusion was eventually broken, and I treated Sam as a video game character as I should have from the start, Death Stranding started to fall apart in my mind. On an experiential level, I would say I underwent a sort of slow disconnection from the game as I approached the ending, exactly the opposite of the game's narrative. When I started, I was entirely focused on everything, partly because I didn't want to mess up, or miss anything, partly because I assumed the wrong things, but also partly because it was a new Kojima game and I was certain that I would enjoy it. I didn't play it very often at the beginning, partly because I wanted to make sure I had time to fully commit myself to the experience, and partly because I wasn't quite clicking with it. When I came to the realisation that I was controlling a video game character, rather than a facsimile of a real person, I was able to disconnect from that more taxing experience. This let me play it like a normal game, which resulted in more frequent play sessions. These also got longer and longer as I approached the end, and was mentally checking out more and more; viewing the game overall as an obstacle to see the story throguh, rather than a vessel for inherently interesting gameplay experiences. closing remarks: If you want a game about time management and routing and exploration of a large map, but it has better-developed characters with a main story and several side stories, play Chibi-Robo instead of Death Stranding. If you want a game about precision movement as means of traversal, with punishment for misstepping, with a fun-to-experiment-with movement system, like I imagined Death Stranding, play [fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger). It's not on GG since it's only been played by like 50 people probably, but it's currently one of my game-of-the-years, along with Obra Dinn and DOOM. I am glad that I played Death Stranding eventually, but I do wish that I hadn't bought it 3 times before playing it. I probably won't play Death Stranding 2. At least, I have no excitement for it whatsoever and can't see myself caring about it for years after launch. I'll probably play Metal Gear Survive though, sometime.