It took a long time to get this far in the RPS Advent Calendar. We’ve conquered mountains, forded rivers, even built some roads along the way. It’s been a journey, but at least we didn’t have to go it alone. So make sure you have your holographic signature handy. It is time to receive door number 18.
It’s Death Stranding!
Katharine: Death Stranding got a tough hand when it first came out on console last year. Looking back at the critical reception, many of the words written about that game were simply baffled by the fact that it wasn’t Kojima’s next big second coming, the relentless hype engine had led them to believe it would be. . Instead, it was just a game of moving boxes from one point to another, and no one could really decide if that was intensely boring or if there was some core of something special to be found beneath the surface.
But if Death Stranding teaches us anything, it’s that time and distance are great healers. If you had to sum it up in its simplest form, yes, this is indeed a game about moving boxes from point A to point B. But what an act of moving it is. In Death Stranding, traversal is the game. From the way you load your cargo to the route you choose through the rocky, mountainous landscape, this is a game where even the slightest change in gradient can make you fall to your knees and destroy your precious supplies. It’s a game where the weather is your enemy, and where the sight of a road or a well-placed zipline can take you to the point of tears. It’s a walking simulator in the best sense of the word, and I just couldn’t get enough of it this year.
The BB Boys are unstoppable!
It’s a game that introduces you to the landscape of its world like no other, because even the simple act of crossing a river can be fraught with danger. You can’t just fly to your destination like Assassin’s Creed or follow the road like Skyrim. Heck, you can’t climb the walls with your bare hands like Breath Of The Wild either. Instead, each journey has to be planned and prepared, balancing the tools you need to get the job done (ladders, ropes and kits) against the amount of cargo you can carry.
After all, you shouldn’t just watch you in Death Stranding. You also have a small passenger with you, BB, who sits in a jar on your chest. BB is your lifeline in this strange, empty world, as they are the only way to sense where the world’s deadly (and potentially explosive) ghosts are. These aliens are the reason humanity has fled underground in the world of Death Stranding as none other than carriers is equipped to deal with them.
Death Stranding continues to fall prey to many of Kojima’s bad habits. The first few hours is almost 90% cutscene, and the way it preloads much of its lore and painfully on-the-nose character names and terminology is enough to make everyone reach for the delete button. But after that opening, there’s a game that’s really unlike any other – and the deliveries are just part of it.
Ultimately, Death Stranding is a game about making connections. There are the literals you create in-game as you zigzag your way through a broken (and very Icelandic-looking) United States to restore the ‘chiral network’ (a kind of proto-internet that was destroyed in the titular Death Stranding- event several years ago) that will bring its disparate citizens back together. There are also the personal ones you’ll forge between individual characters as you go about making your deliveries. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, as some bunker residents don’t agree to join the chiral network until you’ve done a few errands for them to prove that they can trust you.
But it may be the connections you make with other players that leave the biggest and most lasting impression. While Death Stranding is essentially a single-player game, the asymmetrical online multiplayer elements will also see the work of other carriers occasionally overlapping with yours, be it a friendly soul picking up and delivering a lost piece of cargo or a helping hand who will be an essential contributor to much of the construction while you have played the last few game sessions. I’ve ‘made connections’ with only 1,600 other players, according to my endgame stats, which is actually a lot less than I expected.
I love you baby.
But most importantly, those who preceded you do not immediately leave the world ‘filled in’. Admittedly, there is a bit of shaky, shaky, timely-wimey logic involved, but your first run in every new region you encounter is as pure and fresh as the pristine earth beneath your feet. It’s not until you put a bunker online that the world suddenly comes to life, the landmarks left by those early hikers are now visible on your map and in the world around you. I still had a lot of work to do myself, but let me tell you, using my ziplines to connect those left by other players in the hilly mountain range is one of my proudest gaming achievements of the year. I haven’t even done it for the likes, which other players can reward you for all kinds of reasons. I did it because, deep down, these structures – these connections – are about paying for them and leaving behind a world worth living in for those who will come after you.
This is at the heart of everything you do in Death Stranding, a game about so much more than just moving boxes from one point to another, which is why it’s my personal PC game pick of the year. It doesn’t matter how disconnected and disinterested you are in the world around you – a protagonist Sam does everything he can to convey throughout the game – we’re all in this together in the end, and that’s just because of the weird quirks of others to embrace (and in turn the game’s weird quirks, with its conscious babies in jars, nuclear ghosts and all sorts of supernatural nonsense) that the cast of Death Stranding can piece themselves together and build a new life from the ruins of their mistakes. Yes it may seem strange and ridiculous to have a baby in a jar tied to your breast, but I will be damned if I didn’t start loving BB like they were my own by the time I got the end credits. Death Stranding is a strange, strange and yes, at times mind-boggling game, but open your heart to it and you’ll find that there are plenty of reasons to smash that ‘like’ button and love it as much as I do .