Update 46 - Death Stranding: A Lesson in Humanity and Communication

Death Stranding - People, Time, and Connection

Death Stranding is a video game released in 2019 by Kojima Productions. It is notable for being the first game released by Director Hideo Kojima after his departure from Konami, one of the older and more prominent video game developers out of Japan. Kojima demonstrated his love of film through his direction of his Metal Gear Solid titles while working for Konami, leaving many players with fond memories of his directorial work from the 90’s until his departure in 2015.

Death Stranding is beautifully designed. When looking to create their first title, Kojima Productions ranged widely for the kind of technology they wanted to implement in their games. The result is that the facial captures of people like Norman Reedus, Troy Baker, and Lindsay Wagner and Mads Mikkelson look near life-like, with few stumbles into the uncanny valley. Death stranding runs on the Decima engine, first popularized by the game Horizon Zero Dawn.

In what came as a curveball for many consumers of AAA budget video games, Death Stranding is not a traditional third person action or first person shooter title. It does not have RPG-like elements, or experience bars to grind. The numbers that go up are likes, given by NPC’s and other players. For what? For delivering packages and building roads.

Death Stranding - Outside Image Credit to Channel Flurdeh on YouTube

Death Stranding takes place in the near future and in the face of a great extinction event. A kind of material born of a breach in reality, known as chiralium, solidifies as solid matter in chiral crystals. These crystals can facilitate almost instantaneous data transmition between connected locations on earth. Yet chiralium is also an affliction on humanity, infecting the water and instantly aging everything it touches when it rains back down in what are known as timefalls.

Nothing is permanent. Your equipment and packages will rust as if years are passing if you’re caught in a timefall, and humans can age to death if caught in the chrono-caustic rain. The death of a human being in the wake of this apocalypse, this death stranding event, means that a beached thing, a shadow of the dead, will materialize. If a beached thing makes contact with a human corpse, there is a cataclysmic explosion, known as a void out. Humanity lives in bunkers under the ground, and transportation of material goods is left to men and women known as “porters”

Death Stranding sees you play as a porter named Sam Bridges. Instead of collection 10 of whatever to return to your highlighted quest giver, you run medicine, little luxuries and building materials to people overland. While not a multiplayer title where you can dominate with a kill streak, you’re instead given likes for the materials you donate to other players, or to the construction of equipment you and other players can use. You’ll never see another player running around in game, only their bridges, roads, zipline foundations, shelters and stash boxes. They leave little notes warning of beached things and timefalls, and leave ropes and ladders and signs to mark the best way through different areas.

I found myself touched by the game itself. Some of the writing become like Shakespearean monologues when story characters do give you information, layering the same metaphor overtop of itself from different angles. Yet even these served their purpose. The long silences over beautiful yet desolate landscapes are balanced by these dramatic revelations and confrontations.

I have never quite played a game like Death Stranding, but I hope to again. It was something unique to be thankful for the ladder someone I’ll never meet left behind. It felt good to get likes for no reason other than my obsessive need to finish the highways throughout the entire map. Other players were riding those highways, avoiding bandits and dead men and canyons because I took the time to go back and contribute just a little bit more. Between the story and the meditative quality of the gameplay, I would recommend this title to anyone who is interested in feeling something when they play games, rather than numbing yourself. I don’t think there’s much higher praise I could give this title; Death Stranding might make you actually feel something.

Death Stranding Screenshot - Image Credit to Channel Flurdeh on YouTube

Why Death Stranding

For the last 20 years, my younger brother has recommended various Hideo Kojima directed titles to me. Metal Gear Solid titles mostly, none of which were particularly interesting to me. I wasn’t into espionage or rugged one-man army type heroes. It also seemed to me that something was lost in the translation of this piece of Japanese media to an American audience. Japanese media is sometimes dismissed by American consumers as “too weird”. The culture shock is enough to keep people away.

In clearing out my PS5 library at the end of last year, I noticed I had Death Stranding Director’s Cut Installed on my hard drive. I only chose to play the game because it was taking up the most space in my hard drive. My brother hadn’t shut up about it when it came out, nor had many of the critics. As far as everybody else was concerned, I was late to the party- unless I wanted to become a Youtuber milking the “Death Stranding 5 Years Later” date as it wheeled by.

By the time Christmas rolled around, I was nearly finished with the game and had nearly 40 hours logged. I knew my father and brother had both already played the title years before, and I was excited to talk to them about it. My brother was ecstatic that I’d finally taken his recommendation, but my father kind of shrugged.

“You have to hold buttons down so you don’t fall on your ass. You spend the whole game running from one place to the other. Who thought being an amazon delivery driver was a great idea for a game?”

I don’t think my father took the same things away from Death Stranding that I did. My father works his job for an absurd number of hours each week, and when he gets to gaming he’s not looking to feel. He’s looking to numb, to get the dopamine hit of defeating the bad guy and seeing it rendered at the best possible quality. And to each their own. There are books I’m still putting off because I dread the emotional or intellectual exhaustion truly consuming them would bring.

I think often about Yahtzee Croshaw’s classification of “games that make you feel v. games that make you numb”. I think there is a title for just about everyone’s interests, no matter what flavor of distraction they favor. I wanted to write about Death Stranding because it really did make me feel.

There are so few people left in this world, and the porter you play as feels very alone thanks to his past. He can’t stand to be touched by other people. It’s over the many hours spent with Sam, and his “baby but not a real baby just think of it as equipment” BB, you grow a kind of empathetic connection between the two. Not only them, but the other characters spread across this nightmarish future United States.

Death Stranding is a game about building bridges. It’s about love through service, even if you find yourself numb to that love. It’s about people doing the right thing, in spite of the harm it will cause them. It’s about willful people doing what they think is best. I can’t recommend it enough.