Revisiting ‘Death Stranding’ – A Game That Predicted the Future – With A Completionist Approach
Death Stranding has received a second wave of scrutiny this year due to its PC release, opening the game up to a broader audience than it found on the PS4. Despite lamenting how the game reawakened my depression when I played it last fall, I still pre-ordered the PC port to marvel at how my 2080ti could flex against my six-year-old base Playstation 4 model. Like many people, I noticed that playing this game in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic is a completely different experience than playing it at launch in November of 2019. That observation is worth exploring, as well as how this recent playthrough completely recontextualized my overall feelings about Death Stranding.
Death Stranding is practically a different game while playing it in 2020 compared to 2019, when COVID-19 hadn’t radically transformed our society. The idea of a broken America where everyone isolated themselves from one another, where delivering goods to people’s homes was a vital service to many’s survival, and where death suddenly became a central focus of many people’s day-to-day existence, felt like fantasy at the time. Now Kojima’s work feels blatantly prescient and prognosticative. These real-world overlaps aren’t the reason that I ended up appreciating Death Stranding a lot more in a replay than my initial time with it, but that’s undoubtedly part of the intellectual appeal of taking a second pass with the game.
I am far from the first to draw one-to-one comparisons between themes present in Death Stranding and our contemporary pandemic. As early as the spring of this year, I encountered excellent takes of this variety from the likes of Adam Frank at NPR, who has closely examined the way both Death Stranding and the pandemic have put many of us in a more intimate yet isolated relationship to our own mortality. IGN recently interviewed creator Hideo Kojima about how Death Stranding predicted the future. And as of the day of this writing, How Did This Get Played released an episode for “Hideo Kojember” that spent a number of moments marveling at how playing Kojima’s lonely world feels drastically different now as opposed to its release year. If you are interested in delving deeper into comparisons between the COVID-19 pandemic and Death Stranding, these media are all worth exploring in their entirety.
The Value of a Replay
Replaying games is a risky endeavor for a number of reasons. Notably, the length of most modern AAA games typically exceeds the length of entire seasons of television, which can be a slog if you’re pressed for time. Furthermore, I worry that replaying a game will diminish my view of it: maybe my tastes have changed, my horizons have expanded, or my critical lens has been polished since originally playing it. With certain beloved games like NieR: Automata or Night in the Woods, for instance, the first time I played was special enough that I felt a moral obligation to learn the lessons those games wanted to teach rather than circulate back and cheapen them with a replay. And I have even noticed how the act of speedrunning some favorite games like Jak and Daxter or Untitled Goose Game has worn out those games for me.
My time with Death Stranding back in November 2019 was admittedly rushed, and I had a squirming feeling in the back of my mind that I didn’t properly appreciate the game due to how I chose to play it. Even though I extended a three-day holiday weekend by taking an extra day off work, I still found myself bingeing through the game at ten to twelve hours a day. Death Stranding entirely consumed that extended weekend.
I shouldn’t have rushed the game and I certainly should have played it in smaller doses. As I wrote last year, I ended up feeling emotionally exhausted by the time the credits rolled (for the third time in one playthrough). The monotonous gameplay combined with the interminable nature of the storytelling at the end drained me of all energy and desire to play this game ever again.
But over this past year, as more thoughtful critiques of the game like G.B. Burford’s expansive treatise started surfacing, Death Stranding kept creeping back into my mind as something that deserved a second, more patient playthrough. Luke Stephens’ film-length critique forced me through the narrative tunnel a second time but with more distance between myself and the game. (I’d be remiss not to mention the absurdly long seven-hour video by Whitelight on the subject.) Death Stranding thus became a sort of gravitational object orbiting the periphery of my gaming life in 2020 until the PC port finally dropped mid-summer. After thinking for so many hours about how Kojima’s bizarre prognostications had manifested in 2020, I was ready to give Death Stranding a second pass.
Graphics & Difficulty Settings
When installing the PC version of Death Stranding on Steam this year, I had the uncharacteristic idea to earn all achievements for this game. In my Playstation playthrough, I ended up with fewer than half of the 63 trophies because of my impatient approach to the game. Despite my impatience with this first playthrough of Death Stranding, I wanted to challenge myself to explore the game’s systems more deeply on a second run.
I unapologetically default every game with difficulty settings to its easy mode, something that removes a lot of friction from my enjoyment of most narrative titles. But to earn every achievement in Death Stranding, certain stretches of the game must be completed on the hardest difficulty. When I thought about what this challenge entailed, I couldn’t escape the inexplicable feeling that I should follow through on this daunting task of “completing” Death Stranding.
While I will say that the increased difficulty was surprisingly welcome on a second playthrough, already having a firm grasp of the game’s main systems, I wouldn’t suddenly suggest that the “true experience” is to be found at this setting. I think my favorite aspects of Death Stranding were initially the beautifully crafted world, trickling layers of lore, haunting but hopeful soundtrack, and often brilliantly acted cutscenes – none of which have anything to do with the gameplay systems themselves. But this second playthrough caused me to fall in love with the game’s core mechanics in a deep and fundamental way that felt entirely binary to how I experienced the game back in 2019.
Without getting into the weeds about the changes in difficulty between the easiest mode and hardest mode – many of which are notable – surmise it to say that I was forced to play the game with more precision and patience the second go around. Not only did these alterations in gameplay intensity shift my approach to certain sections of the game, but my attitude towards earning all in-game achievements required me to invest more in the systems of the game overall.
How to Enjoy Death Stranding‘s Central Mechanics
One of the primary features of Death Stranding’s world is construction. In particular, a prominent feature that all players will encounter is a road in desperate need of repair, stretching for miles across barren landscapes. The game spits you out at this rubbled road beneath Lake Knot City, a location atop one of the largest stretches of terrain in the open world. Over the course of Sam’s deliveries, you can gradually build, expand, and eventually connect a completely linked road stretching all the way from this starting point to South Knot city at the bottom of the map.
This road can be branched out into tangential avenues that connect additional routes to more obscure locations for deliveries. But, as with many systems in Death Stranding, the game seldom forces you to invest in the building of what can become a colossal and shockingly efficient network of highways. Because this activity felt optional on my first playthrough, not to mention the resource-intensive labor involved in the process, I barely engaged with building any roads on my own.
Part of the widely-acclaimed brilliance of Death Stranding’s gameplay is the social strand network, an asynchronous player interaction that seems the logical extension of systems that games like the Souls series laid out years ago. I appreciated this aspect of Death Stranding when I first played it, but I could never shake the loneliness that the game left me with. Playing Death Stranding a second time with the intention to build, upgrade, and connect everything had a peculiarly different effect. Instead of exhausting and burning me out, I became increasingly invested and proud of what I was building. Every time I finished a project, it excited my brain to start planning the next one. This made me feel useful, not just in terms of the extreme efficiency that my network of structures provided me, but in the way my structures contributed to other people’s quality of life in their experience of the game.
Whereas I never managed to connect all of the roads (or ziplines, for that matter) between cities in my first playthrough of Death Stranding, I could travel anywhere on the map in seconds or minutes by the middle of my second playthrough. A delivery that would have still taken 20 to 30 minutes at the endgame of my first playthrough suddenly took me three to five minutes with my streamlined network of structures.
Since much of Death Stranding’s traversal requires careful planning of routes walking over treacherous surfaces like rivers and cliffs, my structural network effectively eliminated the tedium and tactical movement that the game largely requires. This simplification allowed me to play the game for hours at a time in between streams, taking my mind off the story beats and methodically investing more resources into my structural network, freeing me up to churn through my backlog of podcasts and ignore the fact that I wasn’t advancing the story whatsoever.
The Power of Ziplines for a Completionist
Sailing over jagged rocks that prevent vehicular passage or a blizzardous mountainside that might otherwise ruin your fragile cargo is ridiculously satisfying once you’ve made the proper structural investments throughout the landscape. Not to mention the degree to which these structures can be strategically placed to avoid large swaths of enemy encounters like BTs and MULE camps, streamlining all potential obstacles and distractions between deliveries.
In a way that I would have never expected upon my first playthrough of Death Stranding, my completionist approach to this PC playthrough provided true satisfaction and accomplishment when I was building and connecting structures, even though I knew these tasks were fundamentally optional and somewhat arbitrary. At first, I breezed by them because I was impatient and ready to finish the story. This time, I was a little mournful when I had no more cities left to connect.
In the process of pursuing every achievement in Death Stranding, I was forced to revisit missions in the game that initially grated on me. One such mission that I lamented last year was the pizza delivery mission from Peter Englert. (Due to my stubbornness, I thought there was only one pizza mission.) I wrote at the time that this mission felt purposeless, arbitrary, and defeating. In the grand scheme of the massive goings-on in the post-apocalyptic world, I thought to myself, “Isn’t there something more important to be doing than delivering a single pizza?” I was already feeling depressed by the game’s bleak and oppressive atmosphere, so I didn’t appreciate why this mission felt “video gamey” and disconnected from the story. In my second playthrough, I realized that I would have to deliver several more pizzas to Peter Englert – whose location is annoying to reach even with a vast network of traversal structures.
I groaned. I saddled up another pizza. I set off.
Several pizzas later, I could tell that I was being duped, because unlike any other prepper in the game, Peter Englert was not showing himself via hologram when I completed deliveries. Wondering why the hell I was doing this, I kept going for the achievement. And then something amazing happened. Everything suddenly clicked.
Late in the game, it is revealed that Higgs – the game’s cartoonish antagonist – has been Peter Englert all along. You can return to the delivery destination where you have left all the pizzas and enter the bunker underneath Englert’s shelter. It’s a brilliant little twist that I completely missed at first, and the bunker actually reveals a lot about Higgs’ psyche.
Entering this bunker was a moment of humility for me as someone who plays games and likes to view them critically. By rushing the game at first and deciding not to explore basically any of the optional content in Death Stranding, I pouted and abandoned the game before I could make certain connections, preventing rewarding moments like this from taking their course. One could argue that these moments could have required less repetition to reach. I, however, found a richness to this world that was only accessible in my second, more thorough playthrough.
It later occurred to me to seek out more about the connection between Peter Englert and Higgs. I was delighted to learn how Kojima has chosen to name this character in both identities. As is made explicit through the story’s main dialogue, Higgs’ character is named after the Higgs Boson quantum particle, also colloquially known as the “God particle,” which the character Higgs references outright.
What I didn’t realize in my first playthrough, not making this connection between the character and the pseudonym, was that the name “Peter Englert” is actually a direct combination of François Englert and Peter Higgs, two physicists credited with Nobel acclaim for their theoretical work on the Higgs Boson particle. This realization made me feel like I could practically hear Kojima musing something to the effect of, “I think this idea is super cool and I want other people to be able to figure this out and become interested in the idea with me!”
The Importance of Being Earnest
As I deepened my understanding and appreciation for the characters and the lore that I had largely skimmed over in my first pass of the game, I had a recurring feeling of earnest – a strange contrast to how the game made me feel at first. One of the ways that I can emotionally identify the games that I consider my favorite of all time is a percolating need to share it with other people. I almost never replay games and it’s even less likely for me to replay a game on stream. Death Stranding was an anomaly in that regard, and I kept thinking, “I want people to experience not only this game, but why I love this game.” The hope is that this vicarious appreciation rubs off.
The more I thought about how I wanted to share this beloved game, the more I started to think about Hideo Kojima himself. Death Stranding could accurately be described as a museum of things that Kojima loves, an amalgamated fan-fiction of sorts. I believe it was Heather Anne Campbell who quipped that Death Stranding is basically Kojima’s Spotify playlist, and that is precisely the feeling the game evoked when I spent more time with it. From the cast of professional film actors like Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen, to the tightly interwoven use of licenced music from bands like Low Roar, and even the Iceland-inspired landscape throughout the game, everything in Death Stranding bleeds Kojima.
As I have taken my time with this second playthrough, I have paid closer attention to the kinds of physical media throughout the game – all of which is derived from Kojima’s own library of film, music, and literature, amongst other things like game consoles. Even the cameos of Geoff Keighley and Conan O’Brien, for instance, feel like an extension of this idea that Death Stranding is a complex collection of things that Kojima simply has a fondness for.
As I thought about Kojima’s curation of media, representing beloved creations and desperately sharing them with the world, I realized how similarly I felt about his own work: Death Stranding. If I were Kojima and this were my video game, there’s no doubt that Death Stranding would appear within the physical media that Sam delivers throughout the world. That aforementioned feeling of earnestness that shines through Kojima’s work similarly shines through my own.
And when this word, “earnestness,” started bouncing around my brain as I spent hours building roads and evading BTs, I started to view the characters and cutscenes this way as well. Silly lines of dialogue and moments of awkward acting suddenly felt valuable because of their transparent vulnerability. Kojima is far from subtle, so it’s easy to mock some of his work (“Princess Beach” vaulted me out of the atmosphere from cringe). But I find that Kojima’s lack of subtlety works really well for me because it’s so rare to experience something this sincere in a big-budget title. I think I finally understand part of what our own Andy Webb meant when he wrote at the beginning of this year that Death Stranding was “Distinctly Human.”
When I connected these feelings in my head, I finally appreciated this game in its entirety, including the tedium, repetition, and monotony that the gameplay first represented to me. Everything finally clicked because I related to the creator in a way that I wasn’t able to when I was first playing his game, unconcerned with the creator himself, cynically viewing such side content as “padding.”
Death Stranding is a Slow Burn
Death Stranding somewhat disappointed me when it launched but cemented itself as a contender for one of my favorite games as I spent my hours whittling at the world a second time. I couldn’t have arrived at this superlative feeling towards the game if I hadn’t spent dozens of meditative hours earning five-star rankings for every character, upgrading every possible structure, building every possible road and zipline network, etc. My deferential feelings towards Death Stranding had to be earned.
It’s difficult to pitch people on a playthrough by suggesting that you have to spend an extended amount of time playing a game before it “gets good.” Death Stranding already suffers from that recommendation problem, as the game doesn’t fully develop its gameplay systems until roughly a dozen hours in. I will go a step further here and make the even more precarious recommendation that if you play Death Stranding, you must do it patiently and with the intention of fully devoting yourself to invest in the gameplay systems once they are available. That means transforming what took me 40 hours in a first playthrough to over 90 in my second.
Not every achievement is necessary to obtain the full value from the game but I would encourage anyone playing Death Stranding to lean as far into that mindset as possible when playing. As someone who generally never trophy hunts, I derived a lot more on this second, more complete pass.
Death Stranding is a Game Best Shared with Others
I also think it’s worth revisiting some of my core concerns at the heart of why Death Stranding left me feeling depressed back in 2019, which at this point can be divided into two parts. One of my concerns at the time was that I couldn’t share plot details with anybody, since it’s such a spoiler-heavy game. Another was that I took several days off my stream to play this very isolating game alone, which completely consumed me. These combined left me feeling lonely and fatigued, not able to share or escape from my experience.
When I played Death Stranding a second time, I streamed the entirety of the plot. The game had been out for nearly a year when the PC port was released, so I felt no obligation to protect others from story details and plot points. In fact, it was great to give myself the freedom to revisit a game that no one else had seen me play, which I already had developed a critical opinion that I could share with people while playing it. Death Stranding might not be the most exciting game to watch but it is always engaging to discuss.
The great irony of these two playthroughs and how my opinion has shifted lies in the contrasting nature with which I played them. In the first playthrough, I took a game ostensibly about connection and cut off my contact from my gaming friends for a week while bingeing it. In the second playthrough, I was sharing a game with friends that had initially made me feel isolated. It goes to show that you can, in fact, approach a game with the wrong mindset. That mindset, whether you’re rushing through something like I was with Death Stranding or you’re sharing something patiently with others, can completely distort how you interpret a game – or any work of art.
I’ll reveal in this penultimate paragraph that I have yet, as of this writing, to polish off a handful of achievements in Death Stranding. Two more five-star rankings, three or four more specific structural upgrades, and a dozen collectables are keeping me busy for a few hours more. It has become a comforting game that allows me to find a restful flow state while I listen to a podcast or an Epilogue streamer. I don’t think these final achievements will alter my experience of the game, for better or for worse, but it’s nice to have something to return to in a world that I love this much.
Death Stranding is more relevant than ever and, thanks to it hitting PC, is more accessible than ever. If you’re looking for something deeply strange and philosophical, or simply a graphical benchmark for whatever machine you play on, Death Stranding is worth every hour you are willing to dedicate to it. I am so glad that Kojima Productions expanded their game beyond the PS4 because it gave me the excuse to give Death Stranding a second chance, one that I don’t think I would have taken if it was still sitting uninstalled on my console.
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