Death Stranding: Director's Cut

Death Stranding and I have a... complicated history.

I finished this on my PS5, though I started it on PS4.

I followed the hype cycle and trailers as they were coming out (and was just as confused by them as everyone else was) so I picked up the game in 2019 when it launched. Heck, I think I may have even pre-ordered it. I started it back then, and even played something like ten hours of it, before eventually dropping the game. To be honest I don't know if there's any single reason why I dropped it, it might've just been the fact that I was busy that month and never got back to it, or it may have been because the story hit pretty close to home at the beginning (I have... a lot of baggage around my relationship with my mother) so I may have just not wanted something like that at the time, but, whatever the reason, it just got lost in the shuffle and I didn't get back around to it. I played a few hours of it in 2024 but gave up (again) after a few days. I've never disliked the game, but something about it simply failed to grab me time and time again.

I earned this trophy on the day the game came out.

That's a lot of preamble to say that, last month, I finally dove back into it and I'm very glad I did. I stopped playing right around the time I unlocked my first "active skeleton" so, maybe just because I was able to more easily take on deliveries, I decided to give this game another honest shot and I quickly became hooked. I was learning the most efficient routes between facilities, I finally had a way to effectively deal with BTs, and I, frankly, just had a lot more free time than when it first came out. I found I really liked the ebb and flow of this game.

Throughout my time with it I was reminded of this blog post by Tom Francis where he writes about how he loved doing side-ops and driving from outpost to outpost in Metal Gear Solid V. That game, for me, has been something of a comfort food this past decade. Whenever I'm feeling aimless and want to just kill some time, I'll boot up MGSV, load into one of its two maps, and just drive around and complete side-ops. There's a lack of pomp and circumstance to that when compared to the main missions, a sense of being someone just doing their job, that I (and Tom) found highly engaging. Death Stranding feels like a game designed around that kind of menial labor: the getting-from-one-location-to-the-next while dealing with the physicality of your body and your cargo.

It's a game based on making efficient deliveries, a game about getting from Point A to Point B as quickly, and safely, as possible, while carrying more stuff than you probably ought to. It's a game about stringing together routes that take you between the maps' various facilities while taking on more and more tasks. Sam Porter Bridges is a workhorse capable of carrying a lot, but even he can only do so much. Finding the limits of what you're able to pull off is a lot of the fun of this game, a constant weighing of "can I carry all of this cargo" and "how do I even get to my destination" that makes every delivery worthwhile. So much of this game takes place in the inactivity and downtime, in the route planning and setup, so while late-game deliveries may seem fast and trivial, the work taken to get there makes the relatively straightforward end result feel earned.

Most of my time with this game was spent building roads and ziplines: your two most important methods of transportation. Roads follow predetermined paths that snake between most, but not all, of the major facilities, while ziplines can instead be placed anywhere on the map and will (almost) instantly take you from one spot to another, provided you can find a good sightline to somewhere within 300 meters. It's a fascinating dichotomy as building roads is purely a matter of resource-gathering while ziplines are easier to build, but you're limited in how many you can place so it becomes a matter of how to cover the most distance possible with these somewhat limited tools. Once you have it all in place though, deliveries become a dream to complete. You can drive down a paved road from your start to your destination if you have a suitable path between the two, or you can load up on cargo and zoom from one facility to another across the map if you have enough zipline nodes in place in your network.

I've been focusing on the deliveries in this game rather than the other aspects because, well, I think these are the most interesting. There is combat and there are stealth sequences, but those frankly just don't feel as fleshed out. Fighting against humans isn't particularly fun or memorable and, while sneaking past BTs is stressful early on, by the mid-to-late-game dealing with them is fairly trivial. There's talk in this game about the "rope and stick", about a rope that connects people and a stick that pushes people away, and the fact of the matter is that the rope is far more interesting if only because just about every other big-budget game out there is about the stick. I think the abundance of combat (and the inclusion of guns in general) speaks to a lack of commitment to being a game about a rope.

I respect what this game is going for far more when it's just a moody and atmospheric game about getting from location to location, the combat often just gets in the way of that. I get that they want there to be complications to deliveries, but dealing with terrain or weather already added enough texture to journeys for me. I think this game absolutely could have shipped without human combatants (I understand the need for BTs for at least some additional friction, even if I wasn't always a fan of how they were implemented) and I think it probably would have been stronger for it.

I suppose I should also mention the story, because that's one of the other big things people will bring up when they discuss this game. Ultimately, I have somewhat mixed feelings on it. This game has a pretty unique setting and, as part of that, there is a lot of exposition and sci-fi mumbo-jumbo that needs to happen to properly set it up. Even by the end of the game, I found I didn't fully understand aspects of the world or certain important plot elements because I didn't feel they'd been adequately explained. I know that not everything needs to be fully explained, and I'm willing to suspend my disbelief when necessary, but part of me feels like there are things in the story that weren't fully realized or were obtuse for the sake of being obtuse.

That doesn't mean I disliked the story though, far from it. While I may not understand the, uh, crux of the Death Stranding, the story is ultimately about the characters within it and the connections between them, and all of that is well-developed. Sam Porter Bridges takes a bit of time to warm up to, but he's an interesting character in the context of this game. It's a game about connecting people and strengthening the bonds between them, so a main character who's initially standoffish before warming up to those around him reinforces the game's main themes. The other characters, too, while often a bit simplistic or archetypal, generally serve to enhance some part of the setting or game's story. I could go into specifics, but learning how each character fits into the world was one of the main things I enjoyed about the narrative and I wouldn't want to, say, spoil what Heartman's "deal" is.

Character names are a bit silly though, I will admit. There's a straightforwardness and a simplicity to them that I think I admire, but on the face of it having characters like Deadman, a man who's obsessed with the dead, or any of the facility operators who are seemingly named after the facility they run is a bit much. There's almost a classic sensibility to it; a return to medieval naming customs where someone's job (or role in the story) is part of their name in this new post-apocalypse that I think I like, but it also feels like something the game could do without and not necessarily be worse off for it.

Because I do this with most games I play that have one, I've included my final results screen below. I played a little bit more after this (and I think I may return to it in the future to get that sweet sweet Platinum Trophy) but this is what my stats looked like after obsessing over this game for the back half of March.

I suppose I've rambled enough. In case it wasn't already clear, I think I love this game. Even though I believe this is a flawed game, its imperfections give it character that make it unlike almost anything else I've played. Hideo Kojima, for better or worse, cannot be stopped.