 How do you separate your expectations for a work from the work itself? Or how do you balance the need to be challenging with the need to entertain? We live in a world now where people's entire identities are tied up in the media they consume or the party they vote for or the brand of clothing they wear. A perfect example of this is the furious reaction that happened when Martin Scorsese recently said in an interview that he didn't think Marvel movies were cinema. Online, people went insane and criticized and attacked one of this nation's greatest artists for saying something that's manifestly true. It got so stupid he was forced to write a column in the New York Times explaining that while Marvel movies are slick, well produced, entertaining films made by ridiculously talented people they weren't cinema because they take no chances and don't challenge the audience. They are focus-tested entertainment formulas exceedingly well made by artists who know their craft. They are often artful in their execution but they aren't art. Most of the best games of our or any era really are the equivalent of Marvel movies. Slick, well made products that are entertaining but don't even try to be art. To be art something has to be challenging. Now that doesn't mean it can't be entertaining at the same time. The very best art in any medium is that which is challenging and entertaining. Two of the greatest filmmakers in history are Scorsese and Kubrick and their best movies are both challenging works of art and ridiculously entertaining films. Any art form needs to keep its audience interested. It doesn't matter how profound your insights are if I fall into sleep or walked out of the theater or put my controller down in rage. Today we are going to look at a game that is often but by no means always artfully made. A game that takes an awful lot of chances and tries very hard to challenge its audience or at least its audience's patience. A game that is made by one of the few if not the only, recognized auteur in video game design. And we're going to look at how and why it fails so abjectly at being a work of art and at being a good video game. After the logo. Portrait of the Artist I'm not going to do my whole a brief history here. Suffice it to say we all know who Kojima is. I will, however, take a few moments to at least touch on the things that have made Kojima some kind of nerd rock star and to make fun of his sunglasses because his sunglasses are very very stupid. Now, I think it's fair to say that Kojima is most revered for exceedingly deep and thoughtful mechanics in his games and to a much more controversial degree to a very specific style of storytelling. Kojima's Metal Gear games featured a level of interactivity that is exceedingly rare. What made them so compelling is something that's missing in most other games. Now, as a young kid growing up playing games, I was always pushing at them, prodding at them to see if they'd respond to me. From trying to see if you can knock over objects in the background of 2D side scrollers to whether you could get an enemy to kill itself, I think this is a pretty common thing amongst players. What made Kojima's games so amazing is that his titles were often the only games that seemed to take this behavior into account. If you prodded a Metal Gear game, it almost always responded, often exactly as you'd hoped it would and sometimes in insane ways that you could not have possibly imagined. The iconic cardboard box is a great example of this. Even today, that simple level of interactivity is still very rare. Metal Gear games made it clear that the developer had thought of everything you might try to do and accounted for it. A great example of failing to do this is Skyrim's buckets. It was inevitable that once realizing you could pick up buckets, players would see what else you could do with them and whether the game would react. It didn't take long for players to put buckets on the heads of NPCs and demonstrate that. No, the developers hadn't intended that and hadn't accounted for that. So you could simply put buckets on everyone's head and steal all the stuff in the room. That would have never happened in a Kojima Metal Gear game. If you could think of something to do with a box or a bucket and tried it, you would inevitably discover that yes, Kojima had thought of that too. He'd accounted for it and probably put that there with the intention you'd use it that way. It made Metal Gear feel like a game made by someone who was designing games as a player. And this mechanical depth and playfulness was without a doubt a form of art. It challenged players to approach the game mechanically with thought and purpose. As a general rule, if you asked yourself, I wonder if I can do that in a Metal Gear game? The answer was almost always yes. And this very interactivity made interesting statements about the nature of the art form itself. Then there are Kojima's stories. The best of the Metal Gear stories were compelling and playful and seemed to be purposefully campy. The worst of them were needlessly complex melodrama that seemed shockingly juvenile and half-baked. I never thought that those stories were much better than hit and miss, but I am aware that others found them to be excellent. We'll just have to agree to disagree there. I never thought they were garbage though. All that is to say that Kojima is known for complex and thoughtful mechanics and very heavy story elements. And Death Stranding has both of these Kojima elements. The real question is, are they any good here? We'll split this into two sections, one of the storytelling and one of the gameplay. And because much of the positive writing on this game and much of Kojima's own self-aggrandizement seem to want to focus on the story as being crucially important, we will start there. Because, oh man, it is a total mess in almost every single possible way. A very long movie. As I've been forced to say to any number of people who have defended Fallout 76's story, there's a difference between story and world building. Creating an interesting setting is crucial for creating a good story. You can't have a great story with a shitty setting. But you can have a shitty story with a great setting. The very basic idea of the world and Death Stranding tantalizes. An apocalypse caused by the world of the dead bleeding into the world of the living. Sounds like a great setting. But a story needs to have many elements working to be great. Setting, plot, characters, pacing and structure all need to be at least adequate to truly have a great story in a film or a game. It would have been very easy to use this setting to make a good action story. Some big bed is unsealed the afterlife, you have to go kill them, there are chases and set pieces and challenges along the way. That's the Marvel formula. That would be entertaining, but it probably wouldn't be art. Although it could be. And I credit Kojima Productions for making a legitimate effort to create a work of art here. But it is just a total failure for a variety of reasons. Let's start with one. Theme. The theme of Death Stranding, which also bled into its marketing and has become one of the defenses made by Kojima himself, is that the game is about coming together. It tries to be very clever with its lexicon and service to this blunt theme. Death Stranding. A strand is a beach, but it's also a rope. A rope can tie us together, but things beach themselves and die. The game is loaded with techno babble and blunt, minimally interesting wordplay like this. It seems to think it is far more clever than it actually is though. Usually it's just the kind of stuff you think about slightly before you start peeking on mushrooms. It's reaching for profundity. But that's all it is unless you can take those interesting wordplays and tie them into something that feels insightful and illuminating. And to do that, you'd have to have something you're trying to say. If Death Stranding has one thing it's trying for 45 hours to beat forcibly into your face, it's this. We all need to come together and unite. That's a simple premise, a ridiculously simple premise. And one that could easily form the basis for a compelling work of fiction. The problem here is Death Stranding doesn't actually do a very good job with that because it is insanely muddled in its messaging. The character you play, expensively acted by Norman Reedus, is Sam Porter or Sam Porter Bridges, and he's a porter who works for Bridges and also builds Bridges figuratively but also literally. Seriously, the game is just loaded with this crap. It is exhausting. Anyway, everything about the game, its plot, its characters, and even its naming conventions is about rebuilding the connections between people to try and come together and overcome the apocalypse. Together. But there's a problem when you go with a theme that basic. Because it is a very simplistic way to view things and it does more to obscure the world's problems than to illuminate them. Death Stranding features enemies that are described as terrorists and separatists and that's it. Why are they separatists? I don't know. The game doesn't bother even having you meet one. Why are they terrorists? Again, the game doesn't really say. Instead, the game simply takes for granted that terrorists and separatists are bad because coming together is good and it just assumes you'll agree with that. But here's the problem. Being a separatist can be bad or it can be good. And need I remind you all of the decades old saying that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. This failure to even address what the separatists want almost single-handedly ruins whatever message Death Stranding is going for. If you're an Armenian in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 is it wrong to be a separatist? What if you're a southern slave owner in 1865 is being a separatist bad? You can't answer that question without knowing why someone is a separatist and art, good art at least, forces us to examine complicated questions. Is it always wrong to be a terrorist? What if you are a Ukrainian during the Soviet famine? What if you blow yourself up in Auschwitz? What if you kill a Nazi business owner in 1943 in Holland? Things simply are never as easy as coming together good, pulling apart bad. Death Stranding seems to think that governments are only out to help their citizens. It seems legitimately perplexed that anyone would think twice about joining a government. The only people you meet who are skeptical of this whole enterprise are described as doomsday preppers and weirdos. But in the real world governments don't nicely ask. Governments don't ask for authority, they exert it. And the government you're building eventually is exposed as being a fairly corrupt organization responsible for some catastrophically awful shit. The game is just loaded with half baked ideas and contradictions and theme. I'll give another great example here. The first and most common enemy you will encounter are called mules. These enemies will attempt to catch you and steal your packages and the game spends a good amount of time dwelling on them. Enemy and antagonist motivation is centrally important to a story. So why do the mules want to steal your packages? Well, it's because they are addicted to delivering packages. Stay with me here, man. The game has several lore entries explaining that the world of Death Stranding was a post-scarcity society. Chirol printers had made it so that everyone's needs were basically met through magical tech solutions. And what few deliveries still needed to happen were eventually being done by drones. The enemies you encounter were people who were so attached to delivering packages that they went crazy when there wasn't any more work and became essentially mailman bandits. This might seem funny at first, but it's actually deeply fucked up and typical elitist techie bullshit. And it's another great, great example of just how shallow and poorly thought out much of the lore and world of this game actually is. But the last couple of decades have seen lots of talk about the ever-increasing rate of automation in the economy. Death Stranding mocks this fear of displacement in its lore entries and in its dialogue. It pities these mules and laments their inability to let their shitty jobs go and move on to more fulfilling things. But people aren't clinging to their shitty jobs because they can't think of something else to do with themselves. They cling to those jobs because they end up living and grinding poverty when they disappear. We're rapidly approaching a time when what Death Stranding is talking about will happen. It won't be long now before trucks will be self-driving which will utterly crush the lives of millions of people who drive trucks for a living all over the world. Death Stranding's mule enemies are an insult to all the people who've had their livelihoods stolen so that corporations can pay higher dividends to people like Kojima. That kind of carelessness is all over the plot of Death Stranding. It's enemies aren't just stupidly imagined, they're actively insulting. It's entire premise about bringing the country together and separatist and preppers, it isn't just silly, it's straight dangerously naive. There were many ways to make this an interesting conflict simply based upon the benefits of government versus the benefits of independence. But Death Stranding just isn't smart enough to even bother examining that extremely worthy conflict. A conflict that is complex and has real-world implications even today all over the globe. Hell, the game isn't even smart enough to be worth engaging with much of the time. It is a muddled mess of half-ideas. Death Stranding has a big bad played by the fantastic voice actor, Troy Baker. He gives a great performance even with an obnoxiously mustache twirling script. Seriously, this guy does the licking of the face thing. It's ridiculous, it's absurd. But even 30 hours in, the player still has no idea why Higgs is killing people. Oh, by the way, he's called Higgs because of the Higgs boson. You know, the God particle, the game wants to tell you that. Man, much of Death Stranding's lore and world feel like Kojima recently went on a binge of watching the Discover channel while he was stoned. It regurgitates a bunch of cool science stuff without seeming to really know why he's even mentioning it. Anyway, the game sets up Higgs and his motivations as something that will be a big reveal. But in the end, it's nothing. He was seduced by power and, for that reason, wanted to cause the total extinction of life on Earth. It's one of the very worst payoffs I have ever seen in a game. And just another example of how careless this game is with its themes and its ideas. There is no cohesive message here. There's no interesting revelations. It can best be described as rambling. There are other serious problems with Death Stranding's central premise. Like, for instance, one can make a very compelling argument that coming together isn't enough if that contact is shallow. Death Stranding almost never has you physically in the presence of another human. 90% of the NPCs you interact with are holographic projections of people who are apparently 50 feet away behind a door. Its multiplayer component is basically a sort of social media. Its scoring system and currency is literally likes. There are lower entries about the chemical joy of getting a like. These kind of connections the modern world has given us can reasonably be argued to have been a net negative. A world where social connection is based upon shallow interactions leads to less closeness, not more. I felt more connected to the world when I had 10 close friends I saw every day than I do now when I have hundreds of Facebook friends with whom I share a pithy quote now and then. And that says nothing of the fact of the absolute revolution in our lives that cell phones have been. I have a cell phone for work and it rings constantly and causes me constant grinding stress. That sort of coming together has made my life tangibly worse. More than that, having likes a form of social currency in our lives has led to further tribalization and separation. It has driven out discourse into smaller and smaller bites. Instead of a 10,000 word article, you get 160 characters. And the more outrageous it is, the more you'll get liked and followed and subscribed. What is this game trying to say? I don't know. It never even bothers addressing this obviously huge issue that's being debated in our culture at this very moment. You would think if your entire game was about coming together and the currencies were likes, you would at least take a moment to examine what that's meant to all of us. Good and bad. But it doesn't. By the end of the game, after hours of being told how important it is to come together, you'll discover that the government you're working for has some terrible shit in its past. But at the same time, you'd have prevented the rest of the apocalypse because you, quote, brought America together again. The game itself cannot decide what it's trying to say and it routinely contradicts itself. And the problem with the story goes far beyond even a child's premise and poor motivations for characters. The fundamental conflict has no stakes. Let me ask you this. Why do you not want to die? I know that seems like a silly question, but seriously, why are you afraid to die? The reason you're afraid to die is because you, like almost everyone else who has ever lived, has a painful and sneaking suspicion that there's no afterlife at all. And this is the whole Kitten Kaboodle. As humans, who aren't positive that there is an afterlife, this life seems extremely fragile and precious. Now, what if you were 100% positive that there was an afterlife? What if, say, literal ghosts were constantly floating all over the world dragging people to the other side? Don't you think that would take a whole lot of the staying out of dying? That's the central premise of Death Stranding's universe. Life after death is a 100% proven fact. It's totally unavoidable and to travel to and from the estuary between life and death is something most people seem to be able to accomplish with science somehow. This fact means the stakes in Death Stranding are basically moot. The worst case scenario the game can offer in its universe is that everyone dies. But because life after death is an established scientific fact, that worst case scenario isn't all that awful, is it? The worst moments in human history get a lot less awful if you believe in reincarnation. If you only get one life, well then the Holocaust is an impossibly immense tragedy with unimaginable proportions. If every single one of those people who died are going to be reincarnated 10,000 times, well, that makes it only one moment and a sea of lives. Your death will be the equivalent of stubbing your toe. Unpleasant, but quickly forgotten. In fact, I honestly believe that most people in our world would prefer to live in Death Stranding's universe. I think most people would rather live in a universe with killer ghosts that prove there's an afterlife than here in this one where there is a not-zero chance that the afterlife is a compost heap. There's more, so many more issues with the story. Almost everything the game says is either inane, misguided, or so simplistic it's embarrassing. But we have got to move on now. We've got to go over to how this story is told before we spend just a little bit of time on the gameplay. Pacing. It's so slow. There have been a bunch of recent news bits about Kojima being very interested in making a feature film. And after playing Death Stranding, I am more certain than ever now that that won't work out very well. Death Stranding features top-flight acting performances, especially from the wonderful filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. But it also features a script that has issues all over the place. From a technical perspective, Death Stranding features the best cinematics that Kojima has ever produced. Direction, cinematography, acting, sound design, all of that is top-notch and some of the cutscenes do actually pack a punch emotionally. But great films are not just collections of great shots and cuts. Making a great film is as much about narrative and cinematic structure as it is about framing a great shot and getting good performances from your actors. Much like with fiction, self-editing is crucial to a great movie. The best poetry, songs, and short stories are works that have been distilled down only to what's essential. This is why Hemingway is one of the greatest writers ever. And the very best movies also do this. Earlier I briefly mentioned Kubrick. The Shining is a fantastic horror movie, an entertaining film, and a tour de force of the cinematic art form. There is not one wasted shot. Every single frame of that movie needs to be there and nothing is unnecessary. I'm well aware that games struggle to tell a story because pacing is often difficult to achieve, but Kojima in general and Death Stranding in particular was desperately in need of an editor who could tell Kojima no. There are nearly 17 hours of cinematic cutscenes and dialogue sections in Death Stranding. 17 hours. For a story that could easily have been told in two. There is so much waste and bloat that Death Stranding fails to maintain any momentum or pacing. And there's nothing but this main story. The Witcher 3 has a great main story that it sometimes struggles to move forward in a game that takes upwards of 130 hours. This occasionally led to some pacing issues where you could lose track of the main plot. But that game still felt amazing because all of its side quests and side stories were fantastic. Some of them were as good if not better than the main plot itself. Death Stranding has no side stories. It has no side missions. Hell, it has one mission that you do over and over with barely any writing at all. Aside from the main story moments, you will carry nondescript packages to nondescript NPCs for nondescript reasons. Where the Witcher 3 struggles a bit with pacing, Death Stranding catastrophically implodes under its terrible pacing. Part of this is an issue that relates to gameplay bloat and we will address that again when we get there. But much of the problem with Death Stranding is it simply not very good at driving its story forward. Its mystery comes from cheaply withholding information from the player. And even with only a handful of characters, it takes dozens and dozens of hours to find out anything interesting about most of its cast. And when you do find out, they just tell you outright in ridiculous exposition dumps. Death Stranding does a wonderful job framing shots. And it manages to produce emotionally powerful moments because there's a high degree of craft on display. But it's got 45 minutes of good plot smeared over its 17 hours of cutscene. Death Stranding seems to want to deal with heavy issues. Unfortunately, it doesn't think deeply enough about them to ever surprise the player. But even if it did manage to have a plot and characters worthy of its visuals, Kojima's style of melodrama doesn't work with themes like these. Death Stranding, like all of Kojima's work, tells its story with a tone that's part serious and part soap opera. It revels in a level of melodrama that can be downright distracting. Now, I don't necessarily have an issue with using melodrama, as long as it feels as though the melodrama is purposeful. Like Twin Peaks, for instance. Or, as an even better example, we can think of John Waters. All of Waters' films have the tone, writing, pacing, and acting of 1980's soap operas. But with a John Waters film, that melodrama isn't just funny and entertaining. It's also an artistic statement that can't possibly be separated from the work. A John Waters film can't work without the melodrama. His films use the squeaky clean, vapid tone of the soaps as a contrast to the subject matter of his films. The juxtaposition of the style with the content serves to highlight how shallow and empty the lives of the squares are. It serves to drive home the outsider status of the protagonists of his films. They are movies about people who are incapable of ever assimilating into the world of Donna Reed. And their efforts to do so, when told through the style of melodrama, are the height of absurdity. And it is funny as hell. This tone actually often worked in the Metal Gear games, because the plot of those games usually felt like they were intentionally playing with the subject matter. It was poking fun at how serious spy and soldier stories often took themselves. The frequent fourth wall breaking also felt fresh and different a decade ago. Death Stranding is, nominally, an extremely dark story. So when my wife and I are literally cracking up laughing, when a character falls to his knees and says, No! It just doesn't work. And the fourth wall breaking here only serves to pull you right out of the story. The game simply won't stick to a tone. One minute it seems to want you to invest emotionally in a story about the end of all life on the planet, and the next it's so ridiculously over the top and modeling it's impossible to take seriously. It's often so shockingly bad. I couldn't decide if this tone was on purpose, or if Kojima is just very very bad at writing dialogue. Is this a John Waters film done badly? Or are we watching 17 hours of the room? I lean toward Kojima truly thinking that these moments of absurd melodrama are actually powerful emotional moments. It's made me reevaluate all of the Metal Gear games even. Death Stranding could have taken this world in premise and told an interesting story. The Death Stranding could have been the result of all of the misery of war and death and suffering, building up until the afterlife just burst open. And that could have been used to examine any number of interesting things about who we are and how we live. Instead the most interesting questions the game asks are either totally unanswered or answered in the least satisfying way possible. I'm gonna do like a 15 second spoiler here. You can go forward 15 or 20 seconds if you're going to wade through 40 hours of this game, but I wouldn't bother seriously. But either way, I'm letting you know. 3, 2, 1, here I go. It turns out that the Death Stranding isn't caused by anything people did at all. There's no interesting moral here. It's caused because a lady that is an extinction entity is born. Because that's just something that happens every so often. The two big reveals in the game are both unbelievably obvious and amazingly pedestrian, and they're also pointless. The entire story behind the games is bare bones, minimal, and ultimately pointless. The only thing that makes it even remotely interesting is that as it's going forward, you assume there's going to be some really interesting answers to the question the game asks. But there aren't. It is incredibly deflating. It's lucky the cutscenes and gameplay story moments are visually stunning because that's all there is here. Death Stranding's story is all fashion and no form. It says nothing at all. But hey, it is often nice to look at. So you're left with a theme that wavers between naive but benign and actively insulting. And a plot that can't deliver on anything it sets up. Death Stranding's story is very much like its gameplay. Shallow yet needlessly complex and confusing. Literally a walking simulator. Literally, it is literally a walking simulator. Okay, so Death Stranding presents its story in a visually compelling way and features excellent performances but ultimately adds up to very little because its message is so muddled as to be incomprehensible. But while Kojima's stories have always been divisive, his gameplay has been almost universally praised for its depth and innovation. In Death Stranding, for the first time I'd say actually, Kojima has attempted to have his gameplay and story combine in a way that very few games actually pull off. And it's a fucking disaster. Now, that's not to say there aren't an impressive number of interesting systems here because there are. The problem is, you don't actually need to use any of them. And the stakes of the game, like the story, are nonexistent. In short, Death Stranding is the most boring collection of gameplay systems I have ever encountered. Bar none. The marketing for this game focused almost entirely on its cinematics. In fact, most of the commercials and teasers were cutscenes that you will see in this game. And kind of annoyingly, the very best cutscenes were all pre-release marketing or teasers. It wasn't until very near to release that we got a good idea of what the gameplay would be like in Death Stranding. That right there should have been a huge red flag. Now, I can't go any further without mentioning Kojima's reaction to the mixed reviews this game has gotten. Here, let's put it up on the screen here. Check this out. I am perfectly willing to admit that I prefer action games. But that doesn't mean I only like action games. I absolutely adore Subnautica, which is a slow-paced exploration and survival game. I love several puzzle games. Portal 2 is honestly probably the best game ever made. I even love some walking simulators like the Stanley Parable and Edith Finch. But Death Stranding is a game caught in the middle. It's a game that supposedly doesn't want to focus on combat, yet has a bunch of combat. It seems to want you to use stealth, yet has abysmally simplistic stealth. It seems like it wants to be a kind of exploration puzzle type thing, yet its puzzles boil down to bring a ladder. And the exploration is awful, because everything looks exactly the same. There's no real way to do this other than to examine each of those systems briefly and explain why it fails. Let's start with the core of the game, walking. Death Stranding is literally a game where you put packages on your back and walk from one area of the map to the other, before getting another package and literally walking back over and over and over. In about 90% of your deliveries, that will be the entirety of your gameplay. In the other 10%, you might have to sneak or fight or use a ladder and stuff, but for the most part you will just be walking from place to place, period. The missions in Death Stranding are all exactly. And I mean exactly the same. The positive reviews for this game actually annoy me, because the game is literally nothing but fetch quests. Imagine if the Witcher 3 had only fetch quests with no combat or investigations or anything. You just arrive to the town and a guy told you to ride to the next town and pick something up and bring it back in a straight line. That's the entirety of Death Stranding. No exaggeration. That is it. It is fetch quest slash inventory management the game. I'm not kidding. There isn't even any story attached to the side fetch quests. Everything you pick up and deliver looks exactly the same. The NPCs you deliver to say the same thing over and over and have nothing interesting about them. They are so fucking generic that their names are what they are. You'll deliver to the elder, the mechanic, the inventor, the engineer, the archaeologist, seriously. That's how bare bones the story and characterization is here. It is shocking in its simplicity. It's just awful. The side quests are so miserably bad in story and character that in order to not feel like a massive and insulting waste of time they would need to be extremely mechanically interesting. They are not. They're boring. The people who have reviewed this gameplay positively have all said something similar. They've all said they enjoyed needing to really agonize over their loadout and the need to carefully plan their routes and inventory. That might actually have been interesting. Unfortunately, that's bullshit because there are zero decisions to make. Death Stranding has you slowly unlocking a ton of different and pretty cool tools and items that you can use on your deliveries. There are two big problems with this though. First, it is almost impossible to fail a delivery. In fact, I would say I got a perfect score on almost every single one and I never once failed to make a delivery. And secondly, I promise, I did not actually agonize over my loadout and I barely planned my routes. Because every delivery basically requires only three things. A ladder, a climbing hook, and a weapon. You can bring other things and occasionally they will make your mission incrementally more convenient. But for the most part, all you will ever need are ladders, climbing hooks, and a gun or grenades. So this whole idea that you need to carefully plan is manifestly untrue. In fact, anybody who was actually doing that was wasting even more of their time and kidding themselves. In order to make inventory management compelling, you need to have the possibility of failure. In Subnautica, bringing the wrong gear means dying and losing all your shit. Resources are scarce, so exploration is tense and rewarding and crafting is stressful only because you can do the wrong thing. In this game, you can craft as much as you want. I never once wanted to build something but could not. So after a few hours, I would just craft a ton of shit like ten of everything and pile it all on a cart and as I went along, if it was annoying, I just dropped it on the ground. You can bring more than enough of everything you need with you at all times. There is no compelling choices to be made because the game is balanced so badly it'll let you bring whatever the hell you want. There's no penalty to stacking 15 ladders on your back. If it ends up making you trip a bunch, you just drop them on the ground and keep going. Now, there could have been real stakes here. If the game had been super stingy with materials for crafting, but it isn't so there aren't. The other major problem with the core mechanic of the game is that punishment for failure or carelessness isn't failure. It's annoyance. Are you carrying too much on your back and you're all out of balance? Well, the penalty for that is mashing the shoulder button so you don't fall down. Or, if you do fall down, having to pick everything back up. Enemies attack? The only thing they can really do is knock you down and make you have to pick everything back up. Didn't bring enough ladders? You'll either have to walk really far out of your way and waste more time or slide down a hill and drop your stuff, making you bend over and pick it all back up. Failure and death stranding doesn't produce tense moments because the only cost for failure is a slightly longer time playing the game. Which is admittedly a kind of torture, but not the kind you want in a video game. Death stranding's core systems are all built around annoying the shit out of you. The maps themselves are beautiful, but also just fucking ridiculous, man. As a quick side note, humans are like water. They seek the path of least resistance. So, for instance, humans wouldn't ever live in a field of scattered boulders or on top of a cliff or on the side of a mountain. But because the entire game is based literally on walking, death stranding to have any gameplay at all has to make the terrain as fucking toxically annoying as possible. You can't go four feet without tripping over a rock or needing to cross a river at a snail's pace or having to climb up a steep hill and slide back down and climb back up again. Now, I want to be clear about something. The terrain and traversal system here could have been a cool part of a game. In the way that Breath of the Wild's terrain and traversal are an interesting part of that game. But death stranding has almost nothing else to it. We will get to the rest of the game in a second, but I can't stress enough just how little gameplay is actually here beyond walking. That is basically the game. And I actually think that the terrain and puzzle aspect of traversing the world is cool enough on its own to base a game on. But maybe an 8-10 hour game. Death stranding took me over 45 hours to finish. 45 hours of stumbling and falling and dropping your shit and mashing the shoulder buttons to get your balance back. It is shocking to me that people played this game and thought, yep, that's fun, ship it. The only thing that ever makes this even remotely enjoyable is the unbelievably fucking great soundtrack from Low Roar, which will occasionally kick in and get you all weeping and shit. But most of the time, it's just your footsteps and rocks. This will be the theme, but here is the deal, man. Death stranding's gameplay feels unfinished and out of balance. The crafting is cool, but basically pointless aside from ladders and guns and ropes. The traversal should be a small and interesting part of a holistic gameplay experience instead of basically the whole thing. Kojima stressed that this was a whole new genre of game, but it simply is not. It's a few different games unfinished and mashed together with all of them feeling half-baked like they needed another year to gel. Combat? Stealth? So Kojima seemed intense on this being a different kind of game, and part of that seemed like de-emphasizing combat was a priority. I can get behind that. Again, Subnautica is one of my favorite games of the last few years and there is zero combat there. But Death Stranding actually has combat. It's just awful. Enemy AI is pathetically hilariously awful, making the stealth and combat so putridly easy that stealthing at all is pointless. Early in the game, I would try and very carefully stealth around the ghosts and mules, which led to some tense moments. But after I got caught a few times, it became clear that killing the ghosts and knocking out the mules was so easy, there is no reason to sneak. And a few hours after that, I realized the combat was so easy and bad that I might as well just run straight through the enemies, which amazingly works every single time, always. The human enemies in Death Stranding run directly at you like idiots. They will just line up and let you knock them out with your rope gun or your rubber bullet assault rifle, one after the other after the other. The ghosts and bosses are not better. You just stand still on a rock and shoot them until they die. Combat and stealth in Metal Gear games was challenging and required the player to use a variety of tools and tactics to succeed. It made almost every encounter improvisational joy. Death Stranding's combat and stealth is so simplistic and easy, it's boring. I mean, just watch this. Just look at this. AI in Metal Gear games was generally pretty good. AI in this game feels like it doesn't exist. So if combat is terrible and it is truly shockingly miserable and stealth is totally pointless and it absolutely is and the boss fights are embarrassingly easy, what is the actual game? It's nothing. It's just walking and occasionally falling down and having to pick stuff up. Even death is meaningless. If you die, you come back to life and pick stuff up. At several points in the game, Sam will be transported to different times. There's a World War I section, a World War II section, and a Vietnam section. Each of these parts feels awesome as you enter them. Finally, an actually designed level that tells a story. Finally, something that feels like more than just a procedurally generated field of fucking rocks. But the gameplay in these sections is shooting skeletons. It's so easy and ridiculously half-baked. It feels like an esteem indie game, like something that Jim Sterling would make fun of. I understand that Kojima is interested in movies more than games, but gameplay needs to be something. There needs to be some joy or challenge or improvisation. Death Stranding never confronts you with something that isn't mind-numbingly easy to overcome. It never presents you with a situation that you can't figure out in three seconds. It never even comes close to challenging you in any way at all. And once you figure that out, the game is a miserable slog of walking and waiting for the next pseudo-scientific tech babble nonsense cutscene. In conclusion. Listen. Death Stranding is a total and abject failure. It is one of the very worst games I have played in the last few years. That being said, I actually recommend it if you've got money to spend. Because I think it's a really interesting example of a bunch of systems that almost, but then catastrophically don't, work. It's a great example of a good idea that doesn't actually work like the creator thought it would. Because it's simply not a fun game or a good movie. You should play Death Stranding so you can watch it all fall apart so spectacularly. Death Stranding does literally nothing better than any other game. Exploration? Subnautica just embarrasses Death Stranding. Story? There are hundreds and hundreds of games that have better crafted stories. Death Stranding could have been really good. There is a stealth action mix of Subnautica, Meta Gear, and Breath of the Wild in here somewhere. But whereas Zelda has a map that's a joy to explore because there's a ton to see and fight, Death Stranding is a chore. Because there's nothing to see but rocks and nothing to fight and literally nothing to find. Where Subnautica has a compelling and nerve-wracking crafting system because it matters and is loaded with consequences. Death Stranding is a bore because they never bothered to make the crafting matter. Where every room in a Metal Gear game was an adventure because stealth and combat were intricate and subtle layers of systems. Death Stranding has you actively running away from those parts of the game because they are nothing but a waste of time. If Kojima has spent another two years making the combat and stealth actually matter and making the map actually interesting to explore and making the crafting and inventory management have stakes and hard choices, he'd have had something really great. Combining this interesting traversal system with other gameplay features could have been a hit but having only the traversal system is a catastrophe. You can't hang 45 hours on simply walking from point A to point B and trying not to fall down. Especially if the only consequence for falling down is having to get up and press triangle 11 times before continuing to walk. Death Stranding is shocking garbage. Literally, I was literally shocked at how unfinished and half-faked it is and its inane and absurd 15-hour cutscenes can't save it. And that says nothing of how much chaff there is here. How much pointless time wasting. Every time you deliver a package, Sam bends down and puts it on a shelf and watches it roll away. 55 times you see that little cutscene. You'll watch the elevator cutscene 60 plus times. The recycle cutscene, etc, etc, etc. There are hours and hours and hours of pointless useless shit here. I probably spent 20 minutes watching Sam drink Monster Energy which is its own unforgivable grotesque disaster that we won't even talk about. Alright, I'll see you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye.