Death Stranding

2025-06-28
Leave it to Kojima to be able to meticulously design a set of systems that make being a delivery person fun. You pack up your weird exoskeleton with goodies and jog off into the hills of Not-Iceland spending your time steering Norman Reedus with analog sticks and triggers like someone balancing a big Jenga block tower. It's weird, it's engaging, and--with the feedback loop of robbing MULEs (Kojima-speak for outlaws) to get mats to build bridges and roads asynchronously with randos online to consequently make delivering faster and easier--pretty addicting. For a bit. The grind lost its appeal right around the time the atrociously tedious combat with BTs (oil ghosts?) started to get mixed in. Listen, Mads Mikkelsen, I'm just here to deliver packages so maybe you and your slimeboys stop pulling me into your weird oily mosh pit. Of course he doesn't listen so I turn down the difficulty to the minimum so I can stop getting griefed.

And then I realize the only thing that's left after I've moved past Delivery Time and Getting Oiled Up Time is Kojima Bullshit Time. Don't get me wrong there are charming bits here and there. Sam has some nice character development as the guy who tells everyone to fuck off and literally can't be touched to the guy who has a bromance with Guillermo Del Toro and loves a baby in a bottle. But the plot starts off making little sense and then pretty quickly exits the stratosphere completely. I'm watching some random Snapchats I sent from when I played it in 2021 and there's a guy with a mask pointing a gun at a woman on a beach and then she's running gleefully along the beach with Norman Reedus and then some guy who died comes back and I feel like someone dosed my Greek yogurt this morning with research chemicals. This isn't even a case of me forgetting the plot, I comment in one of the videos "I have no idea what's happening right now," so even then Kojima had me in a chokehold and wouldn't let me tap out till I told him I was a "Homo-Demens". Whatever that is.

If you're a true Kojima acolyte whose blood pressure lowers instead of raises the more acronyms like BTs and DOOMs get thrown around then this might just be nirvana for you. For those of us with a lower tolerance it's still worth a gander because it turns out delivering packages as Norman Reedus is fun as hell.

???
This game was hilarious. It started off very fun and addicting and then became very grindy and boring. I think part of that is the ethos of this game is more of a "Let's have a chill time and deliver some packages". But these days I usually play games with a "Let's see what this game has to offer and then finish it as fast as possible" approach. At the beginning when you're learning the ropes of the world and invested in building bridges and roads and stuff it's very fun. Raiding the MULE camps to get resources to build roads was very fun. But after spending like 5-10 hours doing that I grew tired of it. And then started speeding through the game because the only interesting bit was the story.

At that point I was hampered by the tedium of combat in the game. Especially fighting the BTs. I ended up turning down the difficulty to the minimum so I could mostly ignore them and ignore most of the other mechanics in the game which quickly became tedious.

At this point the only thing keeping me going was the story. And honestly, it's alright. It's mostly a load of nonsense with some nice points. I loved the character development of Sam. He starts off as this guy who wants nothing to do with anyone and literally can't even be touched. But then he has a bromance with Deadman and Lou and warms up. The relationships he forms are heartwarming. I like that there's a whole crew that gathers around Sam. But most of the plot points are kind of classic Kojima horseshit.

And of course there's the classic Kojima nonsense. Everyone has a dumb name that means something in some sort of on-the-nose way. And there's a million weird terms like BTs, DOOMs, Q-Pid, Homo-Demens, Timefall, Chiralium, on and on and on.

Overall it's definitely worth checking out. And is quite fun for a good 10 to 15 hours. Just don't dawdle and bore yourself on the grind which has little reward at the end.