Game Review: Death Stranding

Game Review: Death Stranding by Kojima Productions and published by 505 Games
Score: +7/-5

We got Death Stranding free from the Epic Games Store on 2022-Dec-25, during their amazing annual Christmas free-game-a-day-giveaway.

From legendary game creator Hideo Kojima comes an all-new, genre-defying experience. Stay connected with the "Social Strand System™”.

Sam Bridges must brave a world utterly transformed by the Death Stranding. Carrying the disconnected remnants of our future in his hands, he embarks on a journey to reconnect the shattered world one step at a time.
Starring Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux and Lindsay Wagner.

Before we begin our GAME review, we should emphasize that the scoring is mostly of Death Stranding as a GAME. For this reason, the STORY can only tilt the score by so many points.

Death Stranding is a fantastic story locked behind a boring game. The story is patiently told in over 7 hours of cutscenes with movie-quality visuals and main characters uncannily lifelike in animation and expression.

Although it is also really quite a depressing story, the innovation, complexity, metaphors, and allusions to modern day make it an amazing experience. If you want this experience, you can just watch all the cutscenes for Death Stranding on Youtube.

• +1 Amazing story and +1 it patiently solves all mysteries and ties up loose ends by the end of the marathon.
• +1 Like every good mystery, you have the same clues as the protagonist, so you have the same chance to solve the mystery as they do. This makes the mystery more satisfying during the major revelations because they didn't "cheat" by withholding key information.
• +1 Innovative premise which introduces interesting game mechanics.
• What are common mechanics now have a lore-based reason. For example, you can build structures just about anywhere in the game world, but they decay slowly, and there's actually a lore-reason (the special "timefall" rain that accelerates aging) instead of being just another survival game mechanic.
• +1 Interesting gamification of elements that might otherwise be considered mundane or chores, leading to innovative gameplay. The core gameplay, believe it or not, is about walking carefully. Terrain can be difficult, and you are often carrying heavy loads, so the big challenge is not to fall. Yes, Death Stranding is a mindful walking simulator.
• -1 It's cute the first few times or maybe the first few hours when you try to keep your character from tipping over because of all the parcels they are carrying.
• After that, you either like this gameplay a lot, or it's just really tiresome grind. There's certainly a good attempt to make the concept of postman in difficult terrain a game with a slot of supporting elements, but it can start to get really boring really fast.
• Long stretches of walking is why the concept of "quick travel" in games came about -- people don't see walking simulators as a game and want to get to the action and focus on that action. Either the gameplay hooks you or it does not.
• Interesting use of multiplayer elements by letting you use and interact with what others have placed in the game world.
• +1 On the one hand it is justified by you not being the sole porter in the whole of America. Other people are out there doing the same thing so they'd leave traces (like ladders they've dropped) right? Points for innovation here for sure and some people may like that.
• Also, without this element, the world is rather unreasonably empty.
• -1 On the other hand, it litters the world with items that others have left, like virtual interactions for little reason than to accumulate likes.
• -1 Another potential drawback is it can have unexpected advantages that might make the game maybe too much easier, thus removing the satisfaction of gameplay. On the one hand the core gameplay can be grindy. But when when someone does it for you, that's just trading one unsatisfactory situation for another.
• Fortunately you can play the game in offline mode and hide all of that.
• +1 Early combat is interesting with a focus on stealth and use of a garotte/rope.
• -1  However it is generally quite clunky otherwise, and later on when you have actual guns, the integration into the cargo-carrying system just makes it really clunky. Fortunately, combat isn't the focus of the game.
• -1 Boss fights are terrible. They have a wow factor with humungous monsters but littering the battlefield with gear like grenades that need to be made from your special blood, or major ordnance like rocket launchers, just ruins it on so many levels. It breaks immersion because you could not plausibly have won the fight otherwise.