I talk a lot about endings. I fear that I don’t speak of beginnings often enough.
Death Stranding is a game about beginnings, masked in a game about endings.
I do not spoil it here, mostly because I don’t think it’s a game that can be meaningfully spoiled, but also because I think you should play it! A lot of this will make the most sense after you have played it, otherwise this reads as an unprompted meditation on the power of connection. It is that, but it is very prompted by a fantastic game. It’s a game that is like nothing else except maybe the act of going outside, but it somehow finds resonances in that act that are hard to remember without art like this.
Death Stranding is a game about reconnecting a fractured and isolated America. This already does not sound like a game that I would like, given my noted hatred for “America” in its entirety. The game does do some odd America-as-the-world bullshit but it does so many things so magnificently well that I can’t be too angry at that specific part. I also don’t know that the game is a huge fan of America either. It is, at its core, a game about delivering packages. I spent about 40 hours trekking across mountains and rivers to deliver packages. There are complications to this formula, like the invisible monsters that you often have to sneak past or the random other humans who are addicted to delivering packages and try to steal your cargo from you. There are also literal war zones that you get dragged into by the grief and anger of a dead man. It’s entirely single-player but you do get to work with other players to build bridges and generators and shelters and ziplines and highways to make the rocky terrain more hospitable and easily-traversed. Death Stranding does a staggering amount of stuff with the premise of “post-apocalyptic delivery guy”, all in service of a story about the importance of connection. It’s a game with giant evil whales, inter-dimensional babies, and a woman named Fragile who constantly talks about being fragile, yet somehow all of this adds up to one of the most moving and resonant treatises on the power of the human connection that I’ve ever seen.
Art that truly digs deep into me often makes me feel fragile. They burrow into me and produce tears and paralyzing sadness at the most inopportune times. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I would be far more fragile without them. I’m fragile, but I’m not that fragile.
It took me almost 4 years to finish Death Stranding. I’m pretty sure that it’s by far the biggest commonality between every moment in my life that I’ve played any of it, but part of me feels like there has to be something more, some greater reason why I was drawn to it at such disparate and sporadic times. I played it during 2021, a rough year for a lot of reasons. I played it during the summer before college. I’ve come back to it in fits and spurts at various points, playing through just an order or two before putting it down for months at a time. The blitz it took for me to finish it over the past week is probably the most I’ve played in a short time since early 2021. I think the game would have stuck with me had I played it really quickly, but my connection to it will only be stronger for the ways in which it was woven into so many different chapters of my life. I may not remember exactly who I was when I played parts of it, but I know that I was different. The long and stretched out time I spent playing it means that I’ve grown with it.
I think Death Stranding belongs among the best games I’ve ever played. Or maybe it’s just always been exactly what I needed when I played it, but I don’t know that there’s a difference. Everything is dependent on timing, which is not to say that things cannot wait for us, but nothing that matters ever happens at the wrong time. If it happens at the wrong time then it doesn’t matter.
“Once, there was an explosion.”
I turn those words over in my head a lot. It feels like such a perfect piece of prose (is it poetry at this scale?) to set in perspective our existence. The game fleshes out this idea with more specificity towards the end, but the seeming arbitrariness of life’s existence, of the universe’s existence, is unendingly magical. The present is a series of happenstance events, all of which could be tossed out like the above sentence.
If connections are all that matter, it seems much more foolish to give up. There’s always a connection to make, always something else you can do. The only way to truly see the future is to look at tomorrow, to look at where your feet are going to be soon, to imagine what lies around the corner.
Like a few of my other favorite games ever, Death Stranding threatens to drown its graceful and resonant ideas and mechanics in gamified number bullshit. I think it mostly avoids doing so, and its one of those small gripes that simply fades completely out of thought when I reach for the big ideas. Death Stranding is unique among Returnal and Alan Wake 2 in this respect simply because it has one of the most elegantly incorporated things with this accursed vibe that I’ve seen in a game like this. The “like” system is kind of unbelievable for taking something so insidious and awful in so many manifestations and turning it into a genuinely moving bit of connection and ludonarrative harmony. The elegance of the “like” system make me bristle even more at all the random numbers the game spits out, but the more I think about it the more elegantly I think it is all used. There’s very little mechanical fat, something frankly astonishing for a game of this scale and complexity.
I think Hideo Kojima gets an absurd amount of reverence and special-boy treatment in the games industry. I think this is due in large part to the utter dearth of responsible and robust games criticism at the institutional level that’s required to truly strengthen the industry. There is so much incredible games criticism on YouTube, on sites like aftermath.site, and even on established websites like IGN and Kotaku, but very little - if any - of it gets internalized by the industry. I suppose that criticism isn’t in a much better spot in other industries like music and film, but at least there is a consistent precedent for turning a critical eye to those things. Gamers still bristle at even the slightest whiff of critical engagement with games as art in the context of other art. The stupid response to this lovely piece recently was evidence enough of that.
I also think that the two and a half Hideo Kojima games that I’ve played are astonishing feats of game design and narrative. There’s almost nothing in the world like either MGSV or Death Stranding, and no matter their flaws (of which there are many), that uniqueness is worth celebrating on its own. It is good for the medium for games like Death Stranding to exist, just as it is bad for the medium for “critics” like dunkey to get games like it so horribly wrong.
I don’t think I care if something is unsubtle to the point of looking buffoonish, if it makes me feel what it wants me to I might just fall in love with it if that’s the feeling I need at that time. I definitely needed Death Stranding now. It was somehow more than what I needed. I’ve been in stressful and isolating times lately, worried about who my friends are in very literal ways and forced to stay away from them for literal fear of spreading COVID. How sweet of Death Stranding to, as Fragile says in the first of like 10 magnificent climaxes, “[bring] me a metaphor.”
Death Stranding is, at its very core, a story about a man learning to let people in. This is not a new story, nor is it unfamiliar to anyone walking this planet. Like any enduring fable, the core of the story often gets lost in layers of complexity as writers and artists try to justify their take on it. Hideo Kojima certainly adds layers to the story here, but so many of the layers fold back in on the core of the story that it eventually feels like there are none. Rarely has this story been told with such care given to fleshing out every little detail of rebuilding the connections that slowly teach this hermit how to love. All of the extinction-level bullshit is just a piece of theater for staring the player in the face and telling them to love. To build connections. All of this will fall apart, but a house of cards is most beautiful as it is being built.
Connections are fragile. Life is fragile. We would be nothing without them, so would we not be nothing without our fragility?
I can’t wait for the second game!
Final note: I need to have a conversation with whoever directed Léa Seydoux on her line: “I’m fragile, but I’m not that fragile,” from Death Stranding. There’s a deeply bizarre difference in the pronunciations of both fragiles in the sentence that intrigued and frustrated me every time she said it in Death Stranding. It is a weird word and English isn’t her first language but someone definitely told her to change the pronunciation just so slightly and it’s really odd!