The state of the nation is utter disarray and people, in their necessity to live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from timefall, have completely lost touch with each other and the outside world. Set many years after an apocalyptic event called the death stranding, the story puts you in the well-worn shoes of Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who earns his keep by delivering packages across a broken, timefall-ridden, BT-infested America. As if Hideo “Metal Gear Solid Snake” Kojima was going to make a game without crazy gadgets and guns?īut what is Death Stranding actually about? You will also be able to considerably expand the capacity and speed of your deliveries by using the various trucks and motorcycles that are made available to you. Starting off with a rope to stealthily tie up MULEs, you’ll soon move on to lethal and non-lethal firearms, anti-BT guns and grenades, as well as different exoskeletons that let you carry heavier loads, walk comfortably on harsh terrain, or run really fast and leap huge distances (my personal favourite). In the early game the focus is purely on making deliveries and circumventing any possible contact with hostiles, but your repertoire of abilities and equipment slowly expands to make future deliveries easier. Jury’s still out on whether that’s horrifying or hilarious. Other than that, you’ll often go up against plain old humanoid enemies called MULEs, former Porters who lost their minds and became addicted to hoarding cargo. Where there is timefall, there will also be BTs (Beached Things) – spectral apparitions of the dead, stranded in the world of the living that try to drag you back into death with them. At the center of all your problems is Timefall, a downpour that rapidly ages everything it touches – plants, materials, living creatures. But as you will quickly learn through gameplay (and then excruciatingly re-learn through lengthy exposition dumps), the world of Death Stranding is much more dangerous than it looks. Of course if the terrain was all that threatened would-be deliverymen, everyone would be doing it. Instead, you’re expected to constantly feather on and off the L2 and R2 triggers, leaning in either direction to maintain your balance against the weight of your cargo, the inclines and bumps of the terrain, or even just really strong wind at times. Whenever you start to keel over, you’re prompted to hold one of the triggers to get your balance back up, but this isn’t a mere quick-time event. You will soon find that simply walking in a straight line can be quite a challenge as you lean and bumble in all directions, struggling to maintain balance. Once you head out, you quickly realise that that “walking” is pretty much the core mechanic in Death Stranding which makes this a much more involved game than it initially seems. As you might notice, even before taking your first step in a mission, you’re asked to put considerable amount of thought into the weight distribution of your character and how that will impact the feeling of walking through the game world. Well I’m here to tell you that Death Stranding is no mere walking simulator it is the walking simulator.Įach mission has you accepting an order to deliver a package to a place, followed by a delightfully Metal Gear Solid-esque loadout screen where you try to distribute the cargo on your person to perfectly maintain your center of gravity (or simply pressing the auto-arrange button which always does a perfect job of arranging the cargo for you). Predictably, gamers were quick to mock and dismiss the game wondering loudly and emphatically if Kojima had finally gone mental, and if his stupendously overhyped post-Metal Gear project would be a walking simulator. After being shrouded in mystery for the longest time with multiple lengthy trailers that raised more questions than they answered, the air of mystique was finally cleared at the 2019 Tokyo Game Show where Kojima revealed in a 50-minute long demo, the true nature of Death Stranding: a game about delivering packages by slowly hiking through the mountains in the rain while listening to sad music. The latest project from Japanese auteur Hideo Kojima has been a bit of an odd duck ever since it was first announced during Sony’s press conference at E3 2016. If you can’t appreciate trash, if you can’t overcome the cringe curve, you will find narrative-driven videogames to be a bafflingly unwelcoming place. I’ve often found this to be doubly true for videogames, where even the most noteworthy paragons of the medium often come with a cringe curve that you have to overcome before you can fully immerse yourself in its ludic narrative. Death Stranding is trash, but not in the way you might expect.įilm critic Pauline Kael famously said that movies are so rarely great art, that if you can’t appreciate great trash you have no reason to be interested in them.
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