Sulphur on 22/10/2024 at 06:55

---

I'm still not over the Princess Beach line. I don't think I ever will be.

froghawk on 5/12/2024 at 21:49

---

Death Stranding (2019)

https://cdn1.epicgames.com/offer/0a9e3c5ab6684506bd624a849ca0cf39/EGS_DeathStrandingDirectorsCut_KOJIMAPRODUCTIONS_S4_1200x1600-5f99e16507795f9b497716b470cfd876

Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Kenichiro Imaizumi, James Vance, and Ken Mendoza
Written by Hideo Kojima, Kenji Yano, and Shuyo Murata
Music by Ludvig Forssell
Art by Yoji Shinkawa

Kojima was supposedly fired from Konami due to budgetary concerns over the development of Metal Gear Solid V — not to mention the secret development of his Guillermo del Toro collaboration, the Silent Hill entry PT (Playable Teaser), without Konami's consent, using funds meant for Metal Gear Solid V. Perhaps he was trying to get fired! Finally free from the Metal Gear Solid series, Kojima founded his own independent studio (also named Kojima Productions) and worked out a publishing deal with Sony. The new studio began work on a game using the Decima engine (formerly used for Horizon: Zero Dawn). The resulting game, Death Stranding, is the most Kojima game ever made in every way possible (aside from the horniness, which, while still occasionally present, is quite toned down — the game is mostly too depressed to be horny).

Death Stranding shares a lot of DNA with Metal Gear Solid V, from the stealth elements to the open world, but it's very much its own beast. It was an attempt to imagine a new type of game — a TRUE walking simulator. While there are combat and stealth segments, they aren't the central focus, and instead are mostly used to provide some variety from the main mechanic. Said mechanic is traversal and delivery — Death Stranding is basically a futuristic amazon delivery simulator, and it's every bit as nightmarish as that sounds. If Metal Gear Solid V was about our world today — a disconnected world on the verge of apocalypse — then Death Stranding is the logical next step. Many artists have given their visions of the post-apocalypse, but I've never experienced one that looks quite like this.

It takes place in a post-collapse America where everyone has become truly disconnected and isolated (far beyond what was displayed in Metal Gear Solid V), with a plot centered around attempts to re-establish some sort of connection between people. (While many saw this as a commentary on the pandemic and lockdown, the timing was coincidental.) It's unclear what is going on in the rest of the world. All we're told is some sort of apocalyptic event called a ‘death stranding' has occurred, leading to this state of disconnection. In the wake of that, an organization called Bridges loosely took charge of the country (inasmuch as anyone could truly be in charge), and began attempting to reconnect the country into the ‘United Cities of America' by bringing cities across the country into their ‘chiral network'. The few people remaining in this desolate countryside are preppers — people who built underground bunkers pre-emptively, before the apocalypse, and who are now extremely isolated.

Despite being labeled ‘America', the land itself is actually modeled after Iceland — which means it's gorgeous and cold. The map displays a picture of the USA which the player traverses from end to end, but the game world is comically small relative to the actual America (though that's not a bad thing, as an actual America-sized open world would be way too much). In addition to the land you're traversing seemingly bearing no relation to what's displayed on the map, the weather and terrain remain pretty similar across the country, so even the sense of progression is minimal. With all that said, I think the decision to make this America have no relation to the one know today, from city names to cultural markers, was intentional. This is a country that has completely lost its identity. The sense of dissonance created by seeing that map with something completely unrecognizable plopped on top of it is one of the driving forces here.

Kojima finally got to fully indulge his inner movie nerd with this game, as he cast multiple big-name actors and directors in the game. Sam is played by Norman Reedus (of Boondock Saints and Walking Dead fame), and he isn't just a voice actor — he also did the motion capture, and the character looks like him. Similarly, Margaret Qualley (of The Leftovers and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) plays a character named Mama, Léa Seydoux (of Wes Anderson, James Bond, and Dune fame) plays a character named Fragile. Many of the preppers Sam visits along the way are celebrity cameos, from Conan O'Brien to Edgar Wright.

Kojima also got the likenesses of two of his favorite directors — Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn — to appear as main characters named Deadman and Heartman, though they did not voice those characters. Yes, the names in this game are preposterous. Jersey Boys actor Tommie Earl Jenkins plays a character named Die Hardman (actual name: John McClane — no, I'm not kidding, but he's also one of the only characters that has an actual name). As if Hot Coldman from Peace Walker wasn't bad enough, Kojima had to go and create a whole game's worth of similar names. The antagonists (played by Mads Mikkelsen and Troy Baker) also have punny names, though it may not be obvious why until late in the game in one of their cases.

Speaking of names, this game is obsessed with the words ‘bridge' and ‘strand' (not to mention all the umbilical cord imagery). The president's name is Bridget Strand, and she is dying of cancer. Her daughter, Samantha America Strand (known primarily as Amelie, though she goes by other names as well) is thus taking over her effort to reconnect the country. However, she is being held hostage by terrorists on the opposite coast. The main character, Sam Porter Bridges (because he's a delivery boy who works for Bridges, get it?), is Amelie's adoptive sibling, and he's been tasked with rescuing her. He's a stoic, shut down type, who literally feels pain when people touch him on account of a condition called DOOMS — but more on that in a moment.

Sam's mission, then, is to traverse the entire country from the east coast to the west coast, bringing cities into the network along the way, convincing locals to join up by delivering them packages, and ultimately rescuing Amelie on the west coast. Much of the game's challenge comes from organizing all the packages you're carrying, often on foot, so that you can traverse the difficult, varied, and often rocky terrain without dying or ruining the cargo. You must carefully balance the cargo on your body with how you organize it, and be sure not accept too big of a job on foot. The image of Sam struggling to stay upright while carrying a pile of cargo twice his height on his back is a harrowing one. However, he can also use vehicles — assuming that they're able to traverse the difficult terrain, not run out of batteries, and stay in one piece.

Bringing the right tools for the job is important, and Sam traverses the environment using ropes, ladders, and special external skeletons to enhance his carrying ability, in addition to many other tools. The game has an interesting form of multiplayer that feels somewhat similar to Dark Souls — players can help each other by delivering each others' dropped packages in a mutually beneficial arrangement, creating useful structures (like literal bridges, generators, and safehouses) or helping to rebuild roads, leaving gear for each other, and putting up signs that act as power ups for other players. In other words, the game is quite literally about connection, but in a disconnected way where the players never actually see each other.

The terrain may be treacherous and difficult to traverse, including snowy mountains and steep rocks, but that's hardly the only threat. Chiralium-filled rain known as ‘timefall' causes aging and disintegration to accelerate, making it dangerous to stand out in the rain — so navigating or avoiding timefall is one of the major jobs of a porter. Due to the timefall, there are few trees or animals in this world — it is truly desolate, despite green mosses that can withstand the timefall covering many surfaces. The greatest threat of all is the ghosts. After the Death Stranding, the spirit world fully infiltrated our world. Everyone has a place in the spirit world that they are able to go to called a ‘beach'. Spectres (called beached things, or B.T.s, which are the souls of beings that died on Earth post-stranding) are able to reach across from their beaches into our world and attack people, but adults cannot sense them until it's too late.

If a B.T. (made of antimatter) touches a person (made of matter), they will cancel each other out and cause a ‘voidout' — a giant explosion leaving a large crater in the earth and throwing lots of chiralium into the air, which is a type of matter originating from the beaches which has infiltrated our world after the death standing. This fundamental incompatibility felt to me like a commentary on western empiricism being at odds with the spirit world. Somehow, these two worlds need to be reconciled, but a path forwards is not clear. All corpses need to be promptly incinerated, otherwise they will turn into BTs and run into someone, causing another voidout.

This mechanic is used to discourage killing. Raiders called MULES will attack you and try to steal your cargo, and need to be carefully avoided, outmaneuvered, or fought off. Like Kojima's previous title, the game takes an immersive simulator-inspired route and give you many tools to deal with combat encounters, and many of those are nonlethal and stealthy — but killing is still an option. However, if you kill someone, you must take their body on a long trek to an incinerator in a limited amount of time, before their body explodes. With that said, since many of the nonlethal weapons are just nonlethal copies of lethal weapons like assault rifles, much of the combat feels like a standard third person shooter, complete with shooting galleries as training for new weapons. It's a little disappointing from a game promising a break from tradition, and introduces a little of the ludonarrative dissonance the game is trying so hard to avoid back into the proceedings — but I suppose you need to include some concessions to reel people in.

Adults may not be able to see B.T.s, but premature infants are still firmly connected to the other world, so they can sense them. In a horrific act of exploitation, porters often use babies floating in glass containers as a tool to detect BTs, then throw them away when they've outlived their use. These are known as ‘bridge babies' (BBs). While everyone using them is encouraged to view them as inanimate tools, Sam becomes quite attached to his BB, and their relationship is a central part of the game's story, as is the origin of the bridge babies.

As mentioned earlier, Sam has a condition called DOOMS, which means he has a strong connection to the beaches on the other side. He's also a ‘repatriate', meaning he died as a child but somehow came back to life. The result is that Sam became effectively immortal, as he is transported to the ‘seam' between earth and beaches upon dying, and is able to ‘repatriate' from there (i.e. come back to life). However, DOOMS ‘sufferers' are also plagued by persistent nightmares of a more final apocalypse. Indeed, one of the game's primary themes is the inevitability of the impending sixth mass extinction. There's a problem with people's beaches — they're becoming connected and bleeding into each other. This particular type of connection inevitably leads to extinction.

I'm sure your eyes are crossing by this point from all the jargon and moving parts, and the plot only gets more complicated and convoluted from there — but ultimately, it's another Kojima story about faith in humanity and connection that's perhaps a little too simple and on the nose thematically, but it's at least filled with all sorts of interesting commentary about our world. For example, the BBs seem to represent capitalist exploitation — the sins of our world — and it's insinuated at times that the onslaught of phantoms in the world is a form of cosmic punishment for that behavior. It explores the effects of globalization and the internet through the chiral network and the beaches — as the world becomes more connected once again, it also accelerates the inevitable end.

With that said, that plot convolution is a real problem. Metal Gear Solid 2 used plot convolution to make a point, and it was done so in a tightly paced and controlled manner — but not so in Death Stranding (and this time, it feels as if you're supposed to understand it all). There's so much here that I can barely even begin to encompass it in this article, and the way it's delivered doesn't do it any favors. The game throws so many new concepts at you early on that it's difficult to absorb them all, but most of the game is extremely thin on actual plot development, and instead is taken up by side stories. At lot of crucial information is conveyed via emails and interviews, which aren't even recorded with audio this time — they're text, buried deep in a menu.

The pacing is even wonkier than Metal Gear Solid 4. Much of the 40+hr game's actual plot is delivered in one cutscene at the end, with way too much new information thrown at you at the last second. This information retroactively changes and recontextualizes everything that came before it, but given how long the game is, it's truly impossible to absorb what it all means on one playthrough. Or perhaps even after several — I've read through many plot summaries now, and I still don't think I get it. There are simply too many concepts, moving parts, recontextualizations, and subplots. The plot even contradicts itself at several junctures! Any attempt to truly understand it all is bound to be undermined.

That's especially problematic given the pace at which I played the game. This is a rare game that doesn't feel as if it's designed to be addictive — I felt encouraged to take it slowly, and it took me an entire year to finish it. This made it extra hard to keep track of everything. It's divided into 15 episodes, each named after a character in the game. The second and third are very long, taking up the bulk of the first half (hence the skewed plot distribution). The deliveries can get rather repetitive, which encourages approaching the game in small doses. My playthrough took nearly 50 hours, but I skipped quite a bit of the side deliveries. There is some fun side content, like the racing in the director's cut which was added later via a DLC, but for the most part, the side deliveries get monotonous.

Sam almost never interacts with actual people — instead interacting with holograms — which is potent commentary in and of itself. Most of these interactions take place through delivery terminals, and there are basically just two types of those — the small individual type, and the larger city hub type which includes a private room and a firing range. There is only one private room design, and all of them look identical. This all feels a bit lazy — which is understandable, given the massive scale and ambition of the project, but it also contributes to the repetition. The outdoor environments are absolutely gorgeous — the game's huge vistas, open skies, and overall emptiness do a great job of conveying a depressing and lonely feeling — but I really feel the game would've benefitted from more indoor environments. We visit multiple cities, but we never get to see any of the people in them — it's just more interactions with lone individuals through holograms at delivery terminals. Perhaps this was meant to increase the feelings of loneliness, but with no contrast to that, it doesn't fully land.

Part of the monotony comes from the fact that the preppers are all somehow devoid of personality and affect, barely seeming excited at all to connect with another person, thus undermining the game's message. The stories of the people you meet along the way should be the star of the show here, but instead it all feels a bit jokey and underdeveloped — celebrities playing survivalists with occupations like ‘cosplayer', ‘junk dealer', and ‘film director'. Unfortunately, this means many of the people playing preppers are not really actors and deliver their lines with minimal affect. Not that the lines themselves are much to write home about — you'd expect making the interactions with survivalists to be at least somewhat quirky, but most of them feel surprisingly bland. It never feels as if you truly connect with most of the people you make deliveries to — they simply aren't fleshed out enough as characters.

The game's cast of main characters is where the interesting stories truly lie, and where the game's emotional core resides. The backstories of characters like Heartman and Mama are quite strange and unusual on the surface, but at their core they are stories of people trying their best to maintain connections with their lost families. The same can be said of one of the main antagonists, but I won't spoil that. Reedus gives a nuanced, guarded performance, and the way he interacts with all these characters, gradually letting them in, is one of the game's strongest elements. The lens zooms way out by the end of the story, encompassing cycles of extinction and cosmic purpose. It reaches some arguably rather pessimistic conclusions within all that, but stays hopeful — even all the wild plot twists and convolutions at the climax come down to Sam's connections with another person.

Ultimately, any attempt to write about it will fall short. It's simply too big, too expansive, and too unusual to even try to explain. It took me several months after finishing it to publish this, and I very nearly gave up and deleted it several times. In the end, I've barely scratched the surface. What I can say is that Death Stranding is a completely unique title — I've never played anything quite like it. AAA video games are generally about destruction, so for someone to intentionally make a game about creation and connection in an alienated world is a strong statement. I have to give it major kudos for attempting to break away from the tired combat-loop oriented gameplay of most big titles, while making a lot of solid commentary in the process.

Was I consistently entertained? Absolutely not, but I also think that's part of the point. Making traversing a barren post-apocalytic world a purely ‘fun' experience would introduce ludonarrative dissonance which would interfere with the message. So it isn't always the most fun game to play — after all, being grim and depressing is a big part of the point — and it isn't always the easiest to understand, either, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth taking the ride. It's highly flawed, no doubt — Kojima's ambition got the best of him and I don't think he managed to assemble all of his ideas into a coherent picture — but I'm glad it was made, and I hope it inspires others to run with some of these concepts.

(https://medium.com/@froghawk/death-stranding-2019-cfcb0d087e2b)

Malf on 6/12/2024 at 16:11

---

Okay, bizarre coincidence, but I was just reading a (https://www.quantamagazine.org/exotic-new-superconductors-delight-and-confound-20241206/) Quanta Magazine article about exciting advances in superconductive materials science, and the word "chiral" popped up there too!
It may not be news to everyone here (I didn't do physics at school), but a chiral is "A material with a preferred internal direction".
The more you know!

Aja on 9/12/2024 at 17:29

---

Great writeup on Death Stranding. Reading some of those jargon terms elicited an odd mix of warmth and post-traumatic stress. I loved Death Stranding overall, but I think if they had done something to make it feel like you were actually travelling enormous distances and not just going on a day hike, it would've made the adventure feel more meaningful. I agree that having at least glimpses of some of the cities or inside the bunkers would've gone a long way toward giving the impression that this world is real. But I can also appreciate that Kojima probably doesn't have Konami money anymore, and the game had to scale accordingly. I'm curious how you felt about the extended ending slog..