Death Stranding opens the dance with a very important phrase: the stick was the first tool of humanity, created to put distance between things. Afterwards, man created the rope, which instead serves to join and tighten. In the story The Rope by Kobe Abe this concept appears, explaining how these two instruments were the first friends of the human being. but yet rope and stick, being instruments, they are at the mercy of those who use them, and like the video game, they are means by which action can be taken. Hideo Kojima, full of past experience, he has always said he wanted to create a game that did not use sticks (if we think about it, today most video games require the hero on duty to kill all enemies to save lives) but instead ropes, which therefore did not focus on destroying, but on create and help each other.
Precisely this dynamic, this coming out of the conceptual schemes (let's be clear, not those of the means of communication, or the video game, but those created by years and years of titles with an always similar concept), is what gives power to a title like Death Stranding, but which at the same time made the game difficult to understand for a part of the gamer population. All this, however, does not arise from excuses and justifications such as "it is for a few", "it is too early to understand", but from the mindset created over the years, from the muscle memory that gamers have developed. The aim of this review is therefore to criticize the game, and in doing so we will create (or at least we will try) a bridge between the muscle memory of gamers and the concept behind Death Stranding.
Muscle memory of the gamer
Each medium has a core, a main actor that pushes everything else forward and that differentiates it from the others: obviously, in the video game, it is interactivity. For this reason the first thing we need to talk about is the Death Stranding gameplay, because we are facing a truly unique and never seen depth (perhaps also because there is no exponent to compare). If they asked me to compare Death Stranding - only in terms of gameplay - to some other game I would be really in trouble, because what it leads us to do is something never seen. We've jumped platforms, climbed wrecks, shot Nazis, and even saved the universe multiple times over the course of our gaming lives, yet never before have we been told to carry packages around, make deliveries, and aim to reunify. America. Or rather, never like this.
Death Stranding emphasizes dynamics that often in other games become at most one line of the tutorial: weight, arrangement of the load, damage e planning they are the fulcrum that will lead you to think every time about how to organize yourself to deliver your load. Taking multiple trips (or navigating an avalanche of packages to make just one), choosing where to go, how to avoid the dangers and even what equipment to bring will be a recurring mechanic for each of your journeys. Obviously all this goes to join the gameplay dedicated to walking: hardly the ground you will find will be flat and clean, and therefore you will often have to be careful where you put your feet, because even the lowest and smallest rock could make you lose your balance: everything will be managed by the ridges, which lose (momentarily) the aim and shoot function to get Sam to juggle the enormous weight he carries on his back (in this case literally) and the steps he has to take. While it might seem a bit tedious, having to be careful of the path becomes the random variable of the game, turning every single path into something different. As you progress through the game they will also come exoskeletons of various types and means of locomotion that, if at first glance they could facilitate your deliveries, in reality they will balance with the arrival of more dangerous and long routes.
As we have already said, Sam's path will be made impervious by the Earth, now devastated by the Death Stranding (more on this later): in fact, now violent showers of Cronopioggia make every single journey dangerous. This rain, in fact, has the property of speed up the temporal advancement of what it touches, making everything age old. The packages will then deteriorate, the structures will deteriorate and so on. Fortunately, the game will provide, as you advance, the CCP (Portable Chiral Builder), capable of creating infrastructures of various kinds useful both to you and to other players. Some dynamics of these features we will avoid spoiling them, telling you only that (obviously) the player advancing in the game will discover more and more consequences (direct or not) of these dynamics. Because if the Cronopioggia is something manageable easily thanks to a suit, CAs are the real danger. The areas covered by Cronopioggia (which will vary over time) will in fact often be full of these creature (literally, Stranded Creatures) invisible to the human eye but detectable thanks to the Bridge Baby, a child immersed in an artificial amniotic capsule which, connected to a device on the left shoulder, will help you find and avoid them. The CAs will be of various types, and all of them will contribute to making your path damn dangerous. Fortunately, as you progress through the game, Sam will find himself increasingly equipped to deal with them, in ways that we will let you discover for yourself.
Enemies don't just stop at ACs: the game will also feature the MULES , real delivery junkies, who will have the sole objective of intercepting you and stealing your cargo. If they succeed in their intent, your task will first become to retrieve the package, and then leave for the journey. The MULES will be armed with electric spears that, by dint of hitting you, will lead you to faint. If you find yourself on the verge of death, Sam will be reborn thanks to the fact that he is a resurfaced, taking you back to one of the previous game points (but without full load): obviously this dynamic will not always be present, dismantling the false rumor of the missing Game Over in the game. There are not only enemies in Death Stranding: if Sam's goal will be to bring together the various nodes of America, during the journey the protagonist will meet various characters (many of them with the voices and features of Kojima's friends and sources of inspiration). Some of these characters will play a key role in the game, while others will be simple extras, but all will lead you to a continuous evolution of the gameplay, always asking you for different deliveries: if this could seem like a succession of take-delivery missions (so-called fetch quest) in reality the set of dynamics of loading, travel, planning and setting will make it much more interesting.
Although the game is not a shooter, Kojima often enjoys changing the cards on the table a bit, and so it will also happen in Death Stranding: right in the armed sections the title will lack some more control, making them sometimes difficult to manage (but adding a bit of spice in regards to killing other humans or not). In conclusion, Death Stranding's gameplay is not without imperfections, on the contrary, it feels the weight of being one of a kind, yet it is anything but simplistic and / or monotonous: the set of these rules - simple on paper - create a pantheon of mechanics that draws a varied, fun and intriguing gameplay in many respects. Maybe some refinements would have made it better, maybe doing a bug check due to the meeting of so many dynamics.
Media convergence
We talked about the fact that Death Stranding brings many directors and actors friends of Kojima and his sources of inspiration into the video game. In the cast, in addition to the protagonist played by N, we also find Mads Mikkelsen, Guillermo del Toro (who gives the features to Deadman), Nicolas Winding Refn (which gives the appearance to Heartman), Léa Seydoux (who plays Fragile), Margaret Qualley (in the dual role of Mama and Lockne), Tommie Earl Jenkins (as Die-Hardman), Troy Baker (voice and appearance of Higgs) and finally Lindsay Wagner (that I look to both Amelie and Bridget, although only the latter doubles). The masterful interpretation of these interpreters is also excellently rendered in Spanish thanks to a Carthusian dubbing, which finds only some limitations in the character Amelie (since the American version is voiced by another voice-actress, a choice not reiterated instead in the localization) . Fortunately, the dubbing is at the level of the whole game, finding only a few small wrong choices in certain details (such as the translation of the song London Bridge is Falling Down).
Speaking instead of the graphics sector, the game uses the Decima Engine di Guerrilla Games, and it does it best: every single environment is detailed down to the smallest detail, the distance is built to perfection, truly creating a sense of desolation and freedom. Every single facial movement of the characters is realistic (net of some oversights) and the contacts between the various polygons remain realistic and impressive. Adding pepper to all this is the cinematic construction of the game, which if in the gameplay sessions remains free for the player, in the cutscenes it shows a high-level photograph, worthy of the best films.
Finally, all Death Stranding is based on a soundtrack and a creepy sound sector: if the latter will really immerse you in the game (especially during the sessions with the CAs), the soundtrack (which will appear every now and then during some trips) based almost entirely on the synth pop genre, will be the real sentimental engine in these sessions of long desolate journeys.
The thread that binds Death Stranding to the player
We have repeated over and over again how much Death Stranding should not be isolated from the gaming landscape because it is different: in the end, the game has deep gameplay, has playful dynamics and above all it is fun to play. However, this does not exclude the fact that Death Stranding deals with interesting, profound and decidedly little-known themes in the AAA video game landscape. Huge explosions have killed many people: they are events called Death Stranding, and are caused by the arrival of extraterrestrial creatures on earth, the so-called CA. Little is explained in the beginning, while much is revealed as we advance, for this we will avoid talking to you directly here (but there will be other articles). What is certain is that Kojima wanted to create with Death Stranding a testament to humanity: the game over and over again highlights how true power is not given by who knows what skills, but by contact between human beings. We are not talking about physical contact, but spiritual: the connection that unites people and leads them to connect. The game is about the connection of mankind, and how it makes people stronger. It will seem like a chocolate box tale, but this theme is repeatedly taken and addressed in such an adult way that it has been seen very few times in the video game as a medium.
We kept this gameplay feature for the end of the article just to give it more importance: in the game there will be an asynchronous multiplayer that will create the real magic of Death Stranding. Infrastructure, equipment, means, aids and so on they will also be given out by the players, which will therefore bring greater importance to having to connect with others. In the course of your adventure you will therefore receive Helpi of various kinds, a few nudges from the point of view of the construction of infrastructures and, above all, of the like. These will be a sign that your path and help have been appreciated: while it may seem futile, it will actually have (less) importance in the game. But the feeling that they will really give will come very close to fulfillment in having had importance in the adventure of some other player: they will in fact use your stairs, your paths and signs, which will suggest certain information.
A strong importance is also given to Tears, allergy to chiralium that affects those who have the DOOMS (abilities of various kinds) and that although they are often generated involuntarily, they mix with the real tears that during the game will fall from the eyes of many characters, a sign of the feelings told in every single story, both the main plot and those secondary subplots : in fact, it will be enough to overcome that semblance of fetch quest to find behind each delivery a story, characterizations and a lot of study. What is difficult to explain are precisely the sensations, that thin thread that tightens around the gamer's heart when he starts Death Stranding for the first time: the verb in the title actually means wire in the noun, but carries the meaning of run aground in the verb. This duplicity is the magic that manages to bring out feelings in the player, and in this way create a really deep empathic bridge. Unfortunately, most of these sensations would fall into spoilers, and as such we will talk about them separately, but if there is a goal that we have set ourselves with this review it has been to try to make you understand how Death Stranding is not a perfect game, on the contrary. but yet what makes the human being unique is imperfection, that random variable which as such remains totally random, and which therefore leads to canceling the idea of choice as a binary code, focusing much more on the free will of the human being.
