I Finally Played Death Stranding (Yes the first one)
It’s been a while since I dedicated a post to discussing a single video game. It’s not like I stopped playing games, of course. I finished the new Majima pirate game earlier this year. I played a good amount of Blue Prince—I know that beyond the credits, there’s a lot more to do (I only have one sanctum key so far), but I think it was around when Mario Kart released that I fell off it. Amazing game though. Last year, I really took my time finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Oh, and I even went back and finished Ghost of Tsushima last fall. Plus there was the Episode Aigis DLC for Persona 3 Reload. And of course I played Astro Bot. So, yeah, that should about catch you up on the games I rolled credits on in the past year. I’ll confess to playing a good amount of College Football 25 as well. I’m not sure what counts as “finishing” The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, because I’m sure I haven’t found every ending, but I will say the new stuff in that game was so entertaining, and unlike the 2014 me, the current me actually sees more of what the game overall is doing on a meta level.
I enjoyed all of these games. I briefly considered writing posts on Metaphor and Episode Aigis.
But honestly, the thought of trying to explain to you why the game mechanics of Metaphor are fun just didn’t excite me.
A post about Aigis would’ve been mostly story-focused (the gameplay is just 30 hours of Tartarus grind, which, if you’re like me, you kind of just put on podcasts and enter a pleasant state of mind as you do battle after battle and see numbers go up, but I know it’s not exactly the pinnacle of game design). I didn’t write that post, because, not gonna lie, analyzing that story would’ve been some work, and I was too lazy. (I’m sure plenty of other people have written about it considering the story’s been out for years).
Sure, I could have written those posts if I really forced myself, but writing reviews of every game I finish isn’t really what I want to do with this blog.
But this month, I finished a game I have to talk about. It was such a unique experience, and the game has now taken up a room in my mind with no intention of ever leaving. That game is Death Stranding.
Wait, but… the sequel just came out. Well too bad! We’re talking about the first one.
Am I going to say anything truly new here? Probably not! But I’ve had the itch to talk about this game for days now, and so I must do it.
Watching From Afar
2019
Let’s go back for a moment to fall 2019.
I get a weird feeling when I think about this time. Things were extremely crazy in the world and in America. None of us knew that the world would change even more drastically in just a few months.
In retrospect, I personally was not doing very well in fall 2019. This is a privileged perspective I suppose, but I actually ended up appreciating the quarantine in 2020, because all that extra time at home gave me space to reflect on myself, and perhaps having life shaken up in such an unexpected way was humbling.
But of course, we are not going back to 2020, but to 2019, when the world was about to get the first new game from Hideo Kojima since his departure from Konami. This game actually hadn’t been on my radar, which was probably because I hadn’t been following PlayStation news closely.
Fall 2019 was actually when I got my first PlayStation: a used PS4 slim. I’ll refrain from going into a huge tangent on my entire game console history here.
So anyway, as November approached, I had at least heard of Death Stranding at some point. Videogamedunkey, many of whose videos I’ve rewatched countless times, published a video called “The Fall of Xbox” on September 18, 2019. In the video, he mentions Death Stranding alongside The Last of Us 2, implying them to be exciting upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusives (contrasted with Xbox One’s total lack of exciting exclusives). I think the enthusiast gaming audience in general shared the sentiment that PS4 had quite a lot of strong exclusives, while Xbox One had very few. For me, it was mainly Spider-Man that was driving me to get a PS4. Others jumped in because of Bloodborne or God of War. Not every PlayStation 4 exclusive was a winner, of course, but gamers had high hopes for Death Stranding, even while knowing little about it. The reason was simple: it was the next game from Hideo Kojima.
It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this, but Kojima’s name actually didn’t mean a whole lot to me at the time. I knew who he was, but I hadn’t actually played Metal Gear Solid. Mock me if you must, but you know, I was a Nintendo kid, and also my parents were aware of the ESRB ratings system and didn’t let me have M-rated games anyway, and I mean, even though by 2019 I was an adult, the games weren’t even available on PS4 or Switch yet—yes, I have so many excuses for not having played the series back then (I didn’t play Twin Snakes or the 3DS version of Snake Eater either, ok).
For all the real gamers who knew better than me, Death Stranding was looking like a big deal. Nobody knew what the heck it was, but that only added to its appeal. Because you get to find out what it is when it comes out.
So, was Death Stranding yet another home run title for PlayStation?
Well… it got better reviews than Days Gone.
A Surprising Reception
The reception to this game upon its launch was certainly interesting to me, as a “not totally neutral but not super invested either” observer.
IGN, who had gone back into their decimal-using phase during that time period, gave the game a 6.8. Now look, I’m not so noble as to always read the whole review before checking the score. There are reviews where scrolling down to check the score creates an emotional response in me that I remember for a long time. Skyward Sword was one because I was hoping for that 10 and I saw it. Surprisingly, this Death Stranding review was one of them too. To think that this game that had been so shrouded in mystery, coming to us from one of the most famous game creators, a game that had been anticipated as the next big prestigious PlayStation 4 exclusive received a number lower than 7. It shocked me a bit. I think a lot of people probably expected 9s.
Of course, that was just one publication, but IGN wasn’t alone in being a bit lower on the game than many had expected. Giant Bomb gave it a 2/5. GamesRadar+ had it at a 3.5/5, and GameInformer a 7. On the other hand, GameSpot awarded it a 9/10, and Famitsu gave it their rare 40/40. But Famitsu’s perfect scores are incomprehensible to Americans because we see Nintendogs there and we think “I mean it’s a good game but it’s just Nintendogs!” so do we even care?
Meanwhile, after expecting a lot from it, once he actually played the game, videogamedunkey absolutely hated it.
I remember when Kojima was asked about the reception of the game, his response was sort of like, “Well, Americans are used to first-person-shooters, so that’s probably why they were harsher on the game. Italians and French people have more of the artistic sensibility for this sort of thing so they understood it.” He’s out of line but he’s right. (See the actual quote here).
So, what was this game?! Well, from what I understood at the time, it was a game about walking and delivering packages, and there was a really weird story. So honestly, I didn’t really expect I’d play it anytime soon—that said, I wasn’t going to write it off completely either.
The Evolving Conversation
Time passed and the first strand-type game faded somewhat from the discussion, as all games do. But it got a PC release in 2020, and then in 2021 there was the PS5 “Director’s Cut” version. As I listened to people talk about the game again in podcasts, I still was left with a mixed impression. Some people really loved this game. Some people described it as tedious. By this point, I kinda wanted to play it, but also was scared that I too would find it tedious. And me not liking a game? That would be… sad? (I don’t know why I’m scared of trying things, honestly. It’s a problem).
What was really crazy that year was when dunkey made another video where he went back to Death Stranding and confessed to having replayed the game another two times. At this point I’m like: so the game is actually kind of good, if even its biggest hater can’t help but to play it so much.
By 2024, I’m aware that there is a full-blown sequel on the way. I watch Kojima’s long trailer at the PlayStation State of Play or wherever it was, and it is gripping. I don’t know what’s going on, but I want to play Death Stranding 2. But I feel like I definitely shouldn’t skip the first game. So I figure I’ll get around to playing it sooner or later.
It turned out to be “later.”
The Part Where I Start Playing Death Stranding
In March 2025, after seeing more fans of the game hype it up, and knowing the sequel was just months away, I finally jumped in. I put my PlayStation Plus Extra subscription to good use and downloaded Death Stranding Director’s Cut.
I didn’t make it to the end of chapter 2 that month.
BUT, in June, when Death Stranding 2 launched, I was inspired to get back to it. I needed to reconnect a divided America.
Walking Can Be Fun
To be clear, me not getting far into the game in March was not because I didn’t like what I played. I get distracted from good stuff all the time. During this first attempt at playing the game, I actually realized quite quickly: “This is a walking simulator and I like that.”
Sure, at first, when the game has you carrying a corpse on your back, it seemed a little annoying how easy it was to almost lose balance. But it’s a system that makes walking over rough terrain a slightly more thoughtful activity.
It’s sort of funny to me that I sometimes don’t even actually know what I like. That’s a cool thing about video games, though: you really can’t know for sure how you’ll like something until your hands are on the controller.
Still, for a few reasons, I should have been able to predict it. I mean, do I like hiking in real life? Yeah. Do I like climbing in Breath of the Wild? Absolutely. Walking in Death Stranding isn’t as fun as climbing in Breath of the Wild, I will admit, but in both cases, what you’re doing is navigating difficult terrain, perhaps to reach some beautiful vista.
A Crazy World That Does Not Demand as Much Explanation as You’re Giving Me Right Now
The beginning of the game has plenty of cutscenes. They’re a striking introduction to the world of Death Stranding, where the rain causes time to accelerate for any object it touches, resulting in rapid deterioration. It’s a world where horrifying invisible monsters can drag you away, their footprints in the mud approaching you as you hold your breath to avoid being heard. When people die outside, they need to be cremated quickly or else their souls will linger in this world, becoming ghosts that can potentially cause explosions massive enough to destroy cities. Unsurprisingly, nobody really goes outside in this world except for delivery people. Also, this is America in the future, though America sure does look a lot like Iceland now. But that’s unimportant. The beginning of this game fascinated me by throwing me into this wonderfully strange and bleak vision of our future.
But when you look at trophy statistics on PS5 for Director’s Cut, there’s a big gulf between the completion rate of chapter 1 and chapter 2. Chapter 1 is quick and easy, but chapter 2 is quite a bit longer.
Probably one factor for why people fall off early is because during chapter 2 I recall a huge amount of time was spent just… explaining stuff. The character Deadman who looks like Guillermo del Toro tells you about where the BBs came from and a bunch of other stuff. Yet if you ask me, at that moment, there is no real need for me to understand all that. The overload of expository dialogue simply drags down the pacing, and with so much info, I’m not going to remember all of it anyway. Leaving things as mysteries is actually a good storytelling strategy that makes people want to stick around to find out the answer! You can unveil the mystery when the time is right. Backing up a dump truck and unloading most of the answers on the player at once is just not a great idea.
Still, I complain about this part of Death Stranding, but truthfully I didn’t hate what I was experiencing. I was sort of impressed at how many made-up terms were being thrown at me. BTs, BBs, voidouts, beaches, MULEs….
Once I actually made it to the end of chapter 2, I think that was pretty much where I was hooked. (And judging from trophy stats, almost everyone who made it through chapter 3 played through the rest of the game).
Genuinely, when I was much farther into the game, I did find myself fascinated by a lot of the lore—not to the point where I was reading through every one of the dozens of “Interviews,” but I certainly thought “Dang this stuff is actually pretty crazy and cool.” It was no longer nonsense to me, but to get there, I just needed time to take it all in. There was no need to dump it on me so early.
Come to think of it, I don’t know why Die-Hardman or Deadman think Sam is going to care about any of the background information. All Sam needs to do is deliver the stuff.
Making Connections
The story of this game is weird in good ways, but it’s also “weird” in the sense that it has a mostly-silent protagonist, and he walks up to people who just start lecturing him about stuff all the time.
Essentially, the story is about a man who in the beginning is completely disconnected from others. He has a severe phobia of being touched, and his skin will even bruise if touched. Through the course of the game, he makes physical connections from city to city by expanding the chiral network, but he also makes emotional connections with individuals.He learns the stories of his comrades and he helps them in massive ways.
It’s a story that can be moving. It has some moments where I am really feeling for the characters. At other times, things are just sort of awkward. There are clumsy moments where characters sort of explain the change they’ve experienced yet I haven’t really seen that change happen for myself. Still, the concept of this story is something that I think is powerful.
One of the most fascinating meta narratives around this game is how it seemed to predict the very-near future: a world where everyone stays in their own homes, relying on technology and delivery people to connect them to others. Was this just random chance? Not really. When Kojima thought about this concept of uniting a divided America, it was because America in real life was divided. He doesn’t even live here but he’s right (obviously we are not the only group of people experiencing these issues, but uhhh, you know, there has been a lot of troubling news about America in the past decade…or more). To me it almost reframes the quarantine into some kind of real-life metaphor. We experienced so much division and isolation before 2020, and then things took a turn and the feelings of separation turned into literal, physical separation. And it’s not like we actually solved the underlying causes of division in any way since then, by the way.
You might also view Sam through the lens of Kojima’s exit from Konami. I don’t know that much about that whole situation, I don’t know what exactly caused it, but obviously the man and the company did not split on amicable terms. Konami even removed his name from all marketing materials, including for past products. They deleted the “PT” demo which all horror fans loved, and we never got to see Kojima’s Silent Hills game because it was cancelled. Konami went on to make the cruddy Metal Gear Survive and then mostly just gave up on video games for a while until more recently. Did Kojima feel betrayed and hurt by these events? I mean, I dunno, probably. Death Stranding’s story of a man who is isolated and hurt very well might have been conceived by someone who was feeling the same way. (I’m pretty sure this parallel is something I heard SkillUp talk about recently, so don’t go thinking it’s my original idea).
This is the kind of art that really excites me, the kind where you can see a particular creator’s fingerprints and emotions on it.
Death Stranding’s plot may be confusing, but there are aspects of this story that I love. I love the strangeness of the world and all the unique ideas it has. And I love the feeling the story expresses. Even though I hated the part of the ending where I was just sitting there listening to an explanation, the final final ending was such a positive and happy moment.
And overall, it was just a fun ride. And a fun ride is perhaps the most important thing a video game story can be, for me personally. There were twists I never would have expected (even though the entire story was spoiled to me years ago but I forgot because it was too insane for me to even process).
Stuff That’s Lame
Now, you know what I don’t like about Death Stranding? BTs.
When the ground first turned into tar I was scared for my life and was asking “What is this game????” but once I understood how to deal with BTs, they stopped being so scary. Instead encounters with them became tedious. You have to slowly approach them so the jerk doesn’t drag you under, and you can’t even see them all at once because I mean they’re ghosts and whatever. It’s just not fun to me. I try to avoid them, but at the same time, sometimes you don’t want to go the long way around.
Then there’s combat with MULEs and terrorists. This isn’t great either. It does get more fun as you get more and more weapons (I think there might be even more weapons in Director’s Cut than the original but I haven’t found a definitive list of all differences between the versions to be honest). You can just blast them with rubber bullets. Or regular bullets, but they will turn into BTs if you don’t bring the bodies to the incinerator. Once again, your best strategy is going to be avoiding these people, and fortunately you can get more and more tools to help you do that as you make more deliveries.
The final boss of the game frustrated me. I don’t think the combat was really good enough to justify that type of fight. There were moments where the jankiness of the physics were on full display.
Which brings me to my next point: the physics in this game are sort of janky sometimes. I just get frustrated if my cargo suddenly falls off my pack for reasons that were hard to see. I mean I know logically that if I run into a hanging rock with my cargo, it’s gonna fall. But sometimes it’s just hard to tell, ok? And sometimes I’m in a river and I somehow fall even though the water wasn’t supposed to be that deep. And the vehicles just feel slow and weak; what’s up with that? “What can’t you do?” Sam says. A LOT, SAM! Actually even though they feel weak, you can get them across some crazy terrain. But I have gotten the trucks completely stuck several times now.
Building Bridges… and Other Structures Too
You know what I love about this game? The online aspect. You see, structures from other players will appear in your world. First of all this is a really great addition from a thematic perspective because it literally gets people from all around the world to work together to help each other out. These structures make your game easier, and you will feel good making other people’s games easier. And you can give people Likes and receive Likes so everyone can feel nice! Wooooo!
Right now I’m just obsessed with rebuilding the roads. Because yes, you can build a whole highway system, which, like other structures, is shared across different players’ worlds. Man, I think if I had realized this was part of Death Stranding sooner, I might’ve been more eager to play it—or maybe not, because again, I forget what I actually like sometimes. Once the highway system is complete, getting across the world will be a cinch. But wow, some of these segments take a huge amount of materials. So uh if you have a PS5 GO HELP ME FINISH THESE ROADS RIGHT NOW…. Most of you guys have moved on to the PS5-exclusive Death Stranding 2 by now, huh? I’ll get there eventually.
Anyway, this type of asynchronous multiplayer experience, not dissimilar to the messages people leave each other in Dark Souls, is really quite fun. And of course, asking players to help each other out from long distance certainly fits in well with the theme of the game.
Final Thoughts
Death Stranding is a game where I can boot it up and just relax. Sometimes I’ll start walking and the game will start playing a song for me to listen to. I admit I’m a podcast gamer with a game like this, but in those moments I pause whatever I had on so I can hear what the game wants me to hear.
It’s such a unique experience. It may have annoyed me at moments, but I don’t know if I’ve ever deeply loved a game that was totally frictionless. Because when a game has a certain vision or is taking creative risks, they won’t always work for everyone. Yet the end result is still far richer than a game that plays it safe.
So really my only regret is not playing Death Stranding sooner. Even though the sequel has reviewed better, I highly encourage everyone to play through the first game too, because this experience was truly special.
I sure am looking forward to checking out Death Stranding 2 at some point. But first… DON-KEY KONG. That’s right, let’s sing it together. D-K. DON-KEY KONG. HE’S THE LEADER OF THE BUNCH, YOU KNOW HIM WELL, HE’S FINALLY BACK, TO KICK SOME TAIL