‘Death Stranding’ and Depression
For many people like me, depression is an ongoing involuntary struggle with everyday life. Though most of the time I can course-correct by adjusting my habits, sometimes depression descends like a raincloud that can only be waited out. Somewhere within my playthrough of Death Stranding, this rain cloud swept back into my life. I can’t entirely blame this feeling on the game, but I have never felt a piece of art drag me into such a lonely and difficult place before.
The idea that Death Stranding pulled me back into a depressive state is difficult to articulate, especially considering how excited I was to play it. I cannot express how distractedly excited the anticipation for Death Stranding made me, and I binged the entire game over the course of a weekend. To be clear, I still love the game after playing it. But the combination of the game’s story, gameplay, and design created a depressing rain cloud that has only begun to lift several days after playing. Death Stranding did not cause an irreversible psychological problem, it just eerily reminded me of what dark mental episodes can feel like.
When considering how a game – art, narrative, or otherwise – could influence depressive tendencies, I first thought of the social context in which Death Stranding released. From the game’s announcement, Death Stranding has been premised on mystery. More than any game I have seen before, Death Stranding theories were abound on the internet and spoilers were heavily guarded by fans. The whole idea of this game was to experience the bizarre world that the game promised, unravelling explanations of the game’s premise and metaphysics one episode at a time. Based on this cultural hype for the game, there was an implicit understanding amongst people I know and follow online that you can’t speak to each other about Death Stranding until you’ve beaten it. As enthralling as the game is, I couldn’t (and in many cases, still can’t) share my ideas about it in the way that I normally do with other games. The payoff to all that hype is tucked away in Reddit threads and spoiler tagged articles.
In terms of the game itself, Death Stranding’s story, gameplay, missions, characters, and environments all reinforce a sense of loneliness and isolation that is clearly intentional, but jarring. The game does a brilliant job of selling itself right from the beginning, setting up a harsh but beautifully barren world. Sam Porter Bridges, the protagonist, reluctantly assumes the role of a deliveryman whose higher purpose is to reconnect and thereby restore America as a unified country. It’s a bleak introduction but a hopeful premise, and Sam’s mission is contextualized by well acted and compelling characters.
Though the introduction consists mostly in cutscenes, Death Stranding gradually turns control over to the player via thinly guised tutorial segments. It becomes a wonder to explore the world, as seemingly everything that you can see is traversable – a feeling of wonder that hasn’t been stirred in me since playing Breath of the Wild. Not only is the game fun to explore, but the narrative cadence of slowly reconnecting the world holds the experience together. The game fails to consistently deliver on those meaningful narrative beats, however.
As the game peels back from its shockingly realistic and well-composed cutscenes, the repetitive gameplay loop of Death Stranding begins to drag into a point of nihilism. Perhaps this is intentional, to make the player truly feel the struggle and monotony of Sam’s mission, even as his greater goal of connecting America makes the struggle worth something meaningful. But as many reviewers have elucidated, this struggle drains a sense of fun from the game. In my experience, Death Stranding was inconsistently fun, but always interesting to play. That being said, part of what I think exacerbates my depressive tendencies is monotony and struggle.
If I’m doing something repetitive that takes a large amount of effort but doesn’t feel like I’m making progress towards anything meaningful, then I start to feel depressed. As the game rolled back on its cutscenes, leaving me to dozens of hours of this monotonous struggle with no immediate narrative payoff, I found myself approaching those familiarly pernicious mental patterns. At one point in the game, you are confronted with an “[URGENT]” delivery request for a pizza. This mission serves as a test of how well Sam can balance cargo, and is a tongue-in-cheek mission compared to things like delivering life-saving drugs. But this pizza delivery mission is the kind of meaningless task that made me question if this effort was actually worth it. It’s the kind of thing that causes that rain cloud of depression to roll in.
The environments in Death Stranding are lovingly crafted to the point where every single rock looks handmade, every cliff feels like guided practice for experimenting with crafting mechanics, and the blend between tone and mood shines through the haunting soundtrack. The game’s all-consuming and immersive atmosphere is part of why I had such a negative emotional reaction to the experience. Death Stranding is unrelentingly beautiful and dreadful to look at. With one hand, the game creates a sense of wonder and mystery that makes me want to spend as long as possible in its world, and with the other hand, the game makes me feel stranded and isolated in a way that I can’t wait to escape from. Death Stranding is so effective at commanding emotional mood and tone that I felt trapped within the game’s world.
Feeling trapped within a game you are eager to play and have been obsessing over for years is both paradoxical and guilt-inspiring. On one hand, I should not judge games in terms of my hype for them or judge myself for reacting to them in those terms. On the other hand, this game that I had been longing for was making me feel miserable. And just like when I feel depressed, I felt guilty that I was feeling miserable. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy Death Stranding, I just felt that I couldn’t bear the journey that Sam was somehow able to.
Death Stranding would be a better game if you trimmed out 30% of the missions. The game’s cutscenes alone amass about a dozen hours of footage, enough for an entire season of a television show. That runtime is padded out by about 30-50 hours of delivery missions – give or take – that are functionally identical. Clearly this game wants you to fall in love with its environments, but it navel gazes at the expense of both narrative and character development.
A final thing to consider is the promise of narrative payoff at the game’s conclusion. For a game with such a wild and unique premise, surely the ending would be a psychological maelstrom among the likes of Neon Genesis: Evangelion. In one sense, Death Stranding delivers just that. But in a more concrete sense, the ending is almost a cliched afterthought. Thinking in terms of individual characters, there are practically no character arcs to speak of in Death Stranding. With the clear exception of Cliff, most characters remain a static archetype. After putting in so much effort to complete the game in one weekend, Sam’s character arc resolved abruptly and left me with some disbelief. With disbelief, I started to dwell. That’s when the rain cloud started to pour.
In gathering my thoughts about games, I often like to listen to their soundtracks to get in a proper headspace to write about them. As I gathered my thoughts to write about Death Stranding, I found myself having to pause because of how negatively the music was influencing my thoughts. Though the soundtrack is undeniably beautiful and reinforces everything that the game tries to emphasize through its tone, I found myself spinning into the same negative and depressive headspace that I left the game with. There is no doubt that I will eventually be able to listen to the soundtrack with enjoyment again, but at the same time, I can’t yet make it through the entirety of “BB’s Theme” without returning to my melancholic experience with the game.
I don’t think everyone will feel depressed by Death Stranding. There are clear messages of optimism and hope throughout the game, and the passive multiplayer experience reinforces a sense of purpose and pride in helping other people. But most of the game is spent in isolation. Most of the game looks like a cloudy winter day. Most of the game is spent struggling against the elements to survive. Death Stranding is indeed, as Kirk McKeand wrote, a battle of attrition.
No other video game has created a sense of lasting depression for me before Death Stranding. I know that the feeling will gradually disappear with time, but I can’t help but acknowledge that what many people complained “wasn’t fun” in the game might actually be a helpful analogy to depression for some. Not everyone’s depression manifests in the ways I’ve described, but Death Stranding’s gameplay illustrates some of the causes of those psychological tendencies in me. Sometimes life feels like you’re Sam Porter Bridges, only there’s no America to save. Sometimes all you can do is hide under a Timefall shelter, waiting for the rain to pass.
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