Death Stranding

Death Stranding is a game about a porter making deliveries in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s a game about the importance of connecting people with each other and how difficult this can be. And, being developed by Hideo Kojima, it’s also a bloated, convoluted mess.

The protagonist is Sam, a porter who travels around a barren, devastated landscape to collect and deliver supplies. He’s also the son of the President, and after one of his deliveries goes awry, he’s asked to meet her. President Strand asks Sam to help her make America whole again, but what she intends to do is build bridges instead of walls. She wants to “reconnect” the people in this destroyed version of America, for her vision of a great country is one in which all the people stand together despite their differences instead of being pushed apart because of them. Therefore, she sends Sam west to activate some terminals around the country, establishing a special network, and save his sister – who is to be the next President – from captivity.

The world they live in is a harsh, cruel Lovecraftian scenario. After an explosion – a cataclysmic event called Death Stranding – things on Earth fell apart. The radiation shattered the course of time and the barriers that separated the living and the dead. Now, a single drop of rain can age anything it touches, while ghosts – called BTs – roam the streets in search of people to drag into a sticky tar-like substance. Sometimes, Sam can get glimpses of them and sees himself surrounded by these otherworldly humanoids figures floating in the air, hanging by a single thread. Death is a horrible and dangerous thing in this world, for if a person dies, and is not quickly cremated outside of town, they become a BT in a horrible event that turns the corpse into a huge, hungry, and deformed figure: an eldritch creature with tentacles for a face and dark threads stretching out of its fingers. When the whole event is over, the only thing left in its place is a huge crater where everything used to be.

Sam is a pessimist; he thinks it’s far too late for people to come around and be nice to each other. He’s used to the BTs and to the time-shattering rain, hardly being horrified by the horrible things he witnesses. And he’s not alone in thinking that: “I tell you, there’s nothing more dangerous and destructive than human beings,” a man writes to Sam, “Frankly, if the world hadn’t gone to shit, we’d probably have blown it up by now.”

Sam is a lone wolf, always traveling alone, recoiling at the touch of people. He’s constantly seen carrying a dreamcatcher, but the object continually fails to do its job: Sam is haunted by nightmares of meeting his sister stranded on the beach that serves as a pit stop before the afterlife. Amelie serves as his femme fatale, seducing him with her dominant poise, red clothes, and a pleading, but assertive tone of voice. She commands him and disrupts his life.

Another cause of disruption is the visions that come when Sam connects himself to his Bridge Baby – the characters use these strange babies, which are kept inside portable pods, to spot BTs, connecting life to death. These visions show  Mads Mikkelsen’s character, Cliff, talking to the camera in a paternal way, but Sam doesn’t know what they mean or who Cliff is.

The villains are even more nihilistic than Sam, believing that humanity is long past its due date. They personify the destructive side of human nature and some are even called “extinction entities”. The idea that these antagonists express is that reconnecting people may be a nice gesture, but it comes with an inherent problem that can jeopardize the whole project: the people themselves. A lot of them don’t want to reconnect, sometimes because, like Sam, they prefer loneliness, but sometimes because they think they are superior to others. One of the villains writes about this subject, “Death and destruction are part and parcel of the human condition, and bringing people together only exacerbates that.”

The game asks a big question: when you want to bring everyone together, how to deal with those who are governed by a variety of prejudices? Some people think they are better than others because of their nationality, their sexuality, their gender, the color of their skin, their accent, the region they live in, the way they dress, their posture, their religion, and the list could go on forever. What people always seem to find are random excuses to hate each other. Death Stranding’s answer to this problem is a simple one, however: we should just punch those bigoted people on the face until we deplete their health bar.

The story puts hate at the root of humanity’s extinction. The game’s setting is what is left of the United States after a big explosion, and so it openly talks about the ideology of the current administration, pointing out how Trump’s politics of exclusion and the country’s history of oppression inevitably led them to self-annihilation. “We had us a president who said he was fixing to build a border wall to protect the people. And guess where I was born? On the other side of that goddamned wall, that’s where,” an old man complains to Sam, “Land of the free my ass. Free for some, maybe.”

Reconnecting is not always easy. One of the missions has Sam helping a man to find his lost love. After Sam succeeds, the couple starts living together and everything seems happy, but then the protagonist starts to receive constant emails about them complaining about their married life. Reconnecting may not always work, but at least it’s usually heartwarming when it does. Ironically, though, for a game about reconnecting people, Sam meets very few of them in the flesh during his journey. When he delivers his packages, he is instead greeted by a hologram of his client and is rewarded for his troubles with cold “Facebook likes”, which serve as experience points.

This way, most of the character development in the game can be found not in the cutscenes but in the written interviews or emails that clutter the menu. The dialogues themselves only serve the plot, offering exposition or pointing to Sam’s next objective. If the player doesn’t read interviews and do a certain sidequest, for example, one of the main antagonists in the game, the terrorist Higgs, remains a one-dimensional and uninteresting villain. The interviews, on the other hand, show a character with a troubled past, who was led to a philosophy of destruction by his upbringing, while the sidequest allows the player to meet his humorous, playful side. During normal cutscenes, however, his personality amounts to “let’s wipe out humanity from the face of the Earth because I’m eeeeevil”.

Death Stranding is also concerned with nationalism. We can guess that Sam’s boss, despite being always cordial to him, is up to no good or at least guarding a dark secret, since the man is called Die-Hardman and he’s always seen wearing a very menacing black skeleton mask. It also doesn’t help that his goal, to save Sam’s sister so she can become the next President, shows how he doesn’t quite get how a democracy really works. Die-Hardman’s character arc deals directly with the problems of patriotism: doing wrong things for the benefit of one’s nation, like killing someone or waging war, is seen in a very negative light by the narrative. The acritical mindset of the “good soldier” is punished severely by the events of the story, which make these soldiers linger in a ruined world, stranded in a limbo-like existence. Cliff’s tragic story closely touches these themes, as the character always appears alongside recreations of the great modern wars.

In Death Stranding, character’s names are symbolic. You meet Deadman – a scientist with Guillermo Del Toro’s body – who mostly deals with issues regarding death, such as caring for the Bridge Babies and studying BTs. He has a scar circling his forehead as if someone had already made an autopsy on him. Sam has his job – Porter – and his function – build bridges between people – as his surnames. Some of the names are also ironic. Fragile is a woman that wears a coat adorned with spikes and that, despite all the horrors that she had to face, managed to endure and remain civil. Heartman is a man with heart problems, fascinated by death, as he keeps studying how old civilizations dealt with it, analyzing their concepts of body and soul. And the terrorist Higgs, named after a particle that apparently binds everything, is a separatist.

The game’s narrative is built on a cascade of symbolism, metaphors, and parallels. In Death Stranding, we have the BTs, ghosts of people who became stranded in the world, unable to die. And to spot them roaming the wilds Sam uses Bridge Babies, which are basically fetuses locked inside a pod that mirrors a womb: they are beings that are not truly alive, unable to be born, but are also not dead. Deadman tells Sam that his BB is just an object, manufactured to help him do his task, to be discarded later. Sam doesn’t listen, gives his BB a name, and even soothes them when they are distressed.

Sometimes, however, Kojima can get carried away with the new terminology and things can become silly. Like when Heartman explains that “likecin” is a hormone said to be “responsible for the positive feelings that occur when one achieves a goal, enjoys success, receives praise or gratitude, or any other form of ‘like’ from a fellow human being.” These “likes” porters receive can become an addiction, creating the so-called MULEs, the ridiculous concept of postmen gone berserk, attacking porters to steal their cargo so they can deliver it. Sometimes the strangeness of the narrative is clearly for its own sake, however. Deadman’s backstory, for instance, is bizarre and disjointed, feeling like a half-baked homage to the director of Hellboy 2 – a brilliant movie, by the way – serving in no way the game’s story.

The camera usually stays behind Sam during the game, but sometimes Kojima plays with it. When Sam is carrying the body of a person close to him to be cremated, for example, the camera zooms out a little, leaving him small and fragile, dwarfed by the landscape that surrounds him. When Sam is in the back of a truck with a man giving flat-out exposition about the world, Kojima centers the camera in a third spot and gives it to us to control, making us a third passenger in the truck – which is fitting, since everything the man is saying is directed to the player, not to Sam.

Being a deliveryman, Sam’s job is to pick a parcel in one place and deliver it in another. The objectives, then, are usually the same: go from point A to point B without damaging the cargo. It’s a simple and repetitive loop that Kojima tries his best to make engaging. First, he makes succeeds at making the cargo a tangible object in the world: you see the packages on Sam’s back – you can even arrange them there – and they have their own weight, which can unbalance Sam or make him hard and slow to move. Traversing the environment is in itself a constant obstacle: rocks can make Sam lose his balance and fall, damaging the cargo; rivers and lakes can block his path; mountains can be more trouble than they’re worth, not always offering a clear and easy way down. We can build stairs and climbing ropes to help Sam, but he has to carry these objects on his back as well, adding to the overall weight.

And then you have Timefall, the rain that makes everything age, including the packages that we are delivering. If it starts to rain, we have to hurry. But Timefall can also hide BTs, which turn Death Stranding into a stealth horror game. We have to crouch, and even hold a button to make Sam hold his breath while we pass beside the creatures – if they sense Sam, they infest the ground with tar and try to grab him, while an eldritch creature appears out of nowhere to devour the protagonist. And we also have the very bizarre evil porters prowling the land, ready to steal his cargo.

The game is at its best during the main missions, since this is when all these things pose a challenge. Afterward, however, the systems begin to fall apart, since one of Death Stranding’s biggest failings is its progression system. As Sam delivers packages and connects the stations, he gains new equipment and items that instead of making traversal easier or different, make it a hollow acton. Mountains and rivers are posing a problem? We can now build roads that circumvent them entirely. BTs are horrifying? We can now throw special grenades at them – which are made from Sam’s own blood and piss, because Death Stranding doesn’t lose a single opportunity to be strange. MULEs? Sam gains a weapon that shoots strands of rope that bind them.

Eventually, he even gains the ability to build zip lines that negate all the challenges posed by the environment, the Timefall, BTs, and the MULEs all at the same time. By this point, the central loop of the game – delivering packages between stations – lose all its appeal because the game fails in creating a sense of progression without nullifying all the challenge: it’s one thing to make traversal easier, another entirely to make it hollow, since the dangers that surround it are now irrelevant. The main missions, however, always offer something new, be it a sudden change in the climate or a new type of enemy or situation. The problem only begins after these main missions are accomplished and Sam acquires a new piece of equipment that makes all that he had to go through a painless task.

However, it’s the boss fights the true low point of the game. Most of these battles are just with big monsters made of tar, boasting large health bars, and they are so disconnected from the main game that weapons have to randomly spawn on the ground so Sam can stand a chance: after all, during normal gameplay, ammunition is very limited, since firefights are discouraged. The constant clashes with Cliff also feel like Kojima is still thinking about Metal Gear Solid: in one of them, Sam suddenly finds himself in a jungle with the need to find cover in tall grass to circle enemies silently and take them down without alerting anyone. Other battles are just jarring, like when health and stamina bars, emulating a fighting game, suddenly appear for Sam, breaking the serious tone of the game. And, while we are talking about tone whiplash, some of the writing can take the player right out of the experience, like when some characters emphasize video-game terminology, such as “game over”, or use some incredibly bad puns, such as “Princes Beach”, which feel out of place even in that eccentric world.

The game’s writing isn’t very good in general. Dialogues are full of exposition, some threads are stretched out as far as possible, such as Cliff’s flashbacks, which eventually become tiresome, and some plot twists, such as the final one, don’t exactly work, coming too late to have any dramatic impact.

Death Stranding, then, can be a mess. But it’s a beautiful, complex, and fascinating mess, with strong worldbuilding, memorable characters, and creative design choices. Sure, the writing is far from being the best in Kojima’s career, and things can get boring and repetitive after a while, but Kojima gets most things right.

January 22, 2020.