Death Strandingis a game that showcases the best and the worst of humanity. Launched in November 2019, right before the Covid-19 pandemic began, it would soon come to represent our own isolation, and mirror how we were forced apart from our loved ones and estranged from everyday life as things changed in the blink of an eye. The outside world came to a standstill around the globe; abandoned streets became the norm as we relied on essential services to bridge the gaps.
While taking things to the logical extreme,Hideo Kojima’s weird and wonderful gig economy simulator exemplified our societal loneliness, while emphasising the connections we managed to maintain despite it all. Face-to-face conversations were replaced by Zoom calls as we waved goodbye to physical contact, while things we’d usually depend on from shops or businesses to keep ourselves afloat ceased to exist. Death Stranding was strangely prophetic, and much more poignant than we give it credit for.
Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is doubling down on narrative silliness and larger than life characters, so here’s hoping it still has time for the small stuff.
I reviewed the title prior to its release, when the socially-connected world Sam Porter Bridges was asked to explore was occupied by nothing but journalists and influencers. Progress was wiped prior to the public launch too, so, in a way, many of our achievements are now lost. When millions more got their hands on Death Stranding, this feeling of intimate, unknowing co-operation grew to an unprecedented scale.
I still recall talking with fellow critics as we played for the first time, hastily messaging one another when we came across bridges we had built or vehicles and ladders left behind, hoping that we’d make our respective journeys that much easier. On the other hand, I’d see lost resources from people like Greg Miller or Geoff Keighley and immediately throw them into the nearest ravine. It was an experience of communal sabotage, and over the course of 30 hours I watched this empty wasteland begin to show some semblance of life.
The entire game is an exploration of hubris, touching on the moment-to-moment outpouring of human selfishness as we spend much of the game trying to clamber up impassable peaks or battling monsters that, in most situations, would be impossible to defeat. Death Stranding is different though, and wants to foster a human connection not through touch or voice, but a past remnant of human interaction. A rusting ladder or hanging rope, a submerged bicycle or half-finished road you can bring to completion by taking time out of your day to help out.
Or you could ignore it entirely and find your own way, even if crafting every single item you might need proves laborious and time-consuming, taking several more hours than if you had opened your eyes and accepted the help indirectly presented to you. Hideo Kojima is trying to tell us that every human life is connected in some way, and as our world is continuously hindered by natural and man-made disasters, we must rely on one another to survive even if it’s frightening. Small moments of assistance can build to something magical, and create a reason to keep on going even in a world as desolate as this one. Put aside turning your own urine into grenades and all the weird celebrity appearances, and it’s quite stunning.
If you’re playing Death Stranding for the first time, my advice is to move carefully but fail fearlessly - the game wants you to come to terms with its own unforgiveness.
It’s also a different sort of survival experience in a genre frequently obsessed with gathering resources and building things to ensure your own safety. Death Stranding has plenty of cool mechanics like this, but aside from structures that fade away over time and vehicles you may store at each outpost, the act of survival is far more spontaneous, and there is no knowing how each excursion is going to turn out. You could reach a point of struggle and find some distant porter has left a ladder behind as you’re on your last legs. But after climbing it, weeks of wear and tear might cause the structure to give out. So you rebuild it, leaving it behind alongside a handful of other resources to ensure that whoever makes this trek next is cared for.
Survival games are so often about remaining isolated, or hiding away from threats in the fear that accepting outsiders could spell your demise. Death Stranding isn’t afraid to make us feel alone, but there is always the distant promise of communication, or concrete proof that some unknowing soul has taken this path before and lived to tell the tale, so nothing is stopping us from doing the same. Going at it alone is possible, but far from the best route forward.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -available on PC in early access February 20
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
