Death Stranding

 

Death Stranding:

                            Death Stranding is game made by Hideo Kojima, it's naturally filled with bizarre characters lengthy exposition and indulgent cutscenes, but it's in the long quiet stretches between all this when it's just you hiking alone across a stark haunting post apocalyptic wilderness where it really shines. In these moments that Stranding is quite unlike anything I've ever experienced in a game or any other medium for that matter.

                            

                                 You are Sam Porter bridges, played with strange charisma by the Walking Dead, normal readers a courier delivering cargo across what's left of the United States, a supernatural Cataclysm called the Death Stranding has driven the last of humanity on the ground, leaving the barren windswept surface plagued by soul sucking ghosts called BT rain called timeful that rapidly ages anything it touches, and other high strangeness. Your mission is to hike across North America from the East Coast to the West, connecting scattered settlements to the Chiral network, a kind of spiritual successor to the internet, as you go. Sam can detect BTs which are otherwise invisible, with the help of a tiny creepy baby strapped to his chest. One character in six seats so called breech babies are merely equipment, not people. But Sam can help form a bond with the area in the majority of your time and Death Stranding is spent out in the open plodding slowly from one place to another.

                                    It's essentially a feature lamp batch quest for the environment and the challenges that throws at you makes these trips worthwhile. This curiously Scandinavian landscape is serenely beautiful with a grand sense of scale and a witching atmosphere. But it's not just for show. That Stranding is secretly a brilliant hiking and mountaineering simulator, and every piece of rough terrain you encounter is a puzzle to be solved. If you're careless and you rush things. Sam can trip stack up loses balance get swept away by powerful rivers a slide down steep inclines, losing or damaging cargo in the process. This forces you to slow down and take a more thoughtful approach using ropes and ladders to create paths across the landscape. Along the way you might have to most briefly sneak past BTs, or deal with extreme weather, including disorientating blizzards. You might even get knocked out by terrorists and have your cargo stolen, forcing you to sneak into their camp and take it back. But after all that hardship, you make it to your destination and that feels incredible. This sounds like a lot of hard work. Well, that is the one of my favorite things about Death Stranding is how drip feed to new gadgets and tools to gradually make things easier. 

                            As you progress through the story you unlock an almost overwhelming array of kits, including power gloves for faster climbing Beatty killing blood grenades and mechanical exoskeletons that let you handle more weight, tackle tougher terrain or run faster. But you're never alone out there that strandings must have a seamless connection and this manifests itself in some brilliantly clever, a synchronous multiplayer play of service that was dropping ladders and ropes so using a device called a PCC to build river spanning bridges battery boosting generators zip lines roads and other helpful objects. These then appear in other people's games, including yours. There's something wonderful about struggling up a mountain only to spot a rope left by a federal traveler, which then says you a chunk of climbing the broad strokes of the story of grace and Sam's mission to connect fragmented civilization as an effective hook, but so much of the finer details of the process of cold and uninteresting ways, whether it's through lengthy overwrought cutscenes overlong text heavy emails or rambling radio chatter. The cast is great though. Mads Mikkelsen is an engaging and charismatic villain, and there's a compelling otherworldliness to Liesa those performances fellow career Fragile. Thankfully most of the game is spent out in the field, delivering packages and battling the elements, but a parade of seemingly never ending cinematics towards the end really tested my patience.

                                That said, there are plenty of memorable set pieces and moments. The cutscenes as long and self indulgent as they are free to some really imaginative trippy imagery, and it's rare to see something that's offbeat and surreal created with a budget usually reserved for high end blockbuster action game. This is a lavish game and every respect which playing on a high end PC in 4k really hammers home the PC version one's great and has a bunch of extra features including a new very hard difficulty setting, ultra wide supports and bonus missions where you can unlock Half Life and portals in cosmetics. Every misgiving I have about this training is ultimately snuffed out by the magnificence of hiking across that sweeping rugged wilderness, it's an unbelievably slow game with an almost comical amount of backtracking, especially towards the end. Yet somehow it kept me interested all the way through, granted a ponderous tensive delivery simulator would be a hard sell for a lot of people. But as the value of games that defies genre reward patience and also afraid to get weird. That Stranding is a wild ride worth taking. Even if it stumbles along the way.