four aspects of death stranding
I think about Death Stranding all the time.
For those unfamiliar, it’s a game by Kojima Productions originally released in 2019. You play as a courier (called Sam Porter-Bridges) transporting cargo by foot across post-apocalypse America, connecting the last vestiges of society together along the way. It’s sometimes serious, mournful, beautiful, and weird. Very very weird. It’s a game that takes the tropes and mechanics of an open-world action game and presents them defamiliarised. It feels like a document of our times, with references to climate grief, platform capitalism, even COVID (which it kind of predicted). A lot of people feel a lot of things about it. I started playing it in mid-2020 and finished at the start of 2021
I loved it.
The following are four loose texts about an aspect of Death Stranding and why I love it so much. There are some story spoilers in the last two, but mostly it describes the experience of playing it.
Happy trails.
balance
The threat of losing your balance pervades Death Stranding.
Beyond the ghostly BTs and rogue courier MULEs, the game’s biggest obstacle is your own negligence. Put your foot on an uneven surface or move too quickly down a hill and Sam will stumble/potentially fall, damaging your precious cargo.
Bar a skate/snowboarding game, it’s hard to think of another that bases its mechanics and challenges around an avatar’s balance. While there are other forces that impact Sam (like your stamina or the energy of your equipment), these will tick down over time regardless of your actions. Balance is a wild card, coming into play when your mind wanders, when you least expect it.
The effect of this invigorates the game. Death Stranding has often been described as consisting entirely of fetch quests. While technically true, the simplicity of this discludes the variety within your individual deliveries; how much cargo you have, how you are asked to carry it, how fragile it is, what the terrain you traverse, and what the equipment you have (or don’t). All of this affects your balance in some way, and thereby how you can tackle each delivery.
But more than this the balance sticks out because it hits personally. I have a neurological disorder (Charcot Marie-Tooth) that causes fewer muscles to develop in my limbs, which affects my balance. When walking, I scan the ground for hazards and if unlucky, I fall.
Part of my life is in this game.
When I play my sense memory snaps in. The shock of losing your balance, the millisecond recentering in response, the crashing finality of a fall. When Sam’s packages go flying, I think of the items I have dropped irl, how my left trouser leg will sometimes rip at the knee. Somehow, it is always the left that rips.
But Death Stranding isn’t a traumatic reminder. In fact, it’s soothing and strangely cathartic. This constant focus on balance pushes you to be slower, be more aware of your surroundings. Played like this it becomes a game of mindfulness, one of keeping balance rather than losing it.
For all its strangeness, Death Stranding offers a specific realism un-found in other AAA games. Sam feels like a person physically responding to forces/their surroundings rather than a perfect digital puppet. I hope other game makers take the baton and find new ways to invigorate/iterate/complicate movement across space the way Death Stranding does through balance.
nature
For somewhere so post-apocalyptic, Death Stranding is very beautiful.
Its three maps contain Icelandic valleys, red deserts, ruined cities, lush rolling fields, and snowy mountains seamlessly meshing together. When traveling to each delivery point, the world feels big, obstacles brutal and the road long. But once you get there it feels smaller, former challenges now manageable. Not because you gain the equipment and skills to move through it, but the knowledge that you can pass anything you come across.
I spent much of the UK lockdowns wishing I was somewhere else. The game didn’t end this feeling, but the slow hikes through its variety of places helped (especially when self-isolating in November). When I did leave the house, I couldn’t help thinking about Death Stranding as I crossed muddy fields and uneven forest floors, grappling with the outside world.
I could also feel the game in those walks’ isolation. Despite its asynchronous multiplayer, Death Stranding can be a very lonely experience. Sometimes it can feel empowering, healing even, but other times it’s oppressive. As through the lockdowns, heading outside in-game is a dangerous task. There’s a lot of things you must plan for, and crucially, you are heading out only because it is necessary. The scenery is not your concern.
Your attention will be on the terrain and your enemies, the ruined buildings that remind you that there was a whole world (our world!) before this current one. With no one around but faceless combatants and literal ghosts, it’s a world plagued by absence, of things past, of things we can no longer do.
And then there’s the rain — Timefall — that rusts your cargo and equipment, aging the world around you, plants budding, withering and flowering again in a matter of seconds. A character takes off her glove to reveal an old hand of a body exposed to it. Any structure you create will wear down as it pours, and the ghostly BTs will appear. The ground is treacherous and the rain an omnipresent enemy, like a gritty remake of the Super Mario Bros. 3 sun, or the third act of Far Away reimagined as a Dark Souls boss.
It makes me think of the extreme weather happening due to climate change. It doesn’t feel accidental that the BTs manifest themselves in a crude oil-like substance that spreads across the environment if you get caught by them, old fragments of buildings and cars emerging along with it; an eldritch eco-pocalypse. The only difference is the circular nature of timefall, the dead plants being replaced by new plants, stuck in a strange equilibrium. If only our climate crisis were so circular. Some things will not be coming back.
But in-game the rain will clear, and the beauty that first hit you will return, though you know it will soon return. It’s hard to hold these two views of beauty and hostility, but both are true. Like the nature of our world, it is overwhelming in majesty, reminds us of our smallness, and regardless of our attempts to form it, will always hold our ankles in some way.
care
I didn’t care for much of Death Stranding’s narrative. The script is repetitive, sappy and arch. I spent most cutscenes phone in hand, listening rather than paying attention. Its themes feel better served in its playing, especially in the way a delivery is helped by the asynchronous actions of other players. The message seems to be someone has helped you, and that you will help others.
But one part of the story does deliver this message, right at the end of the game.
First, some set up:
Sam is an apathetic protagonist. He doesn’t believe in America or the outcome of his mission. Even at the ceremony all but thanking him, he slinks off. And I don’t blame him. His employers (the UCA) are neoliberal technocrats, their silicon valley-ass ideology made into governance, the values of social media made into that of a society (or what remains). Why rebuild the world for their benefit? What will they give back that is better?
The UCA’s one good move is providing Sam with his BB Lou, the baby in a papoose-like pod that allows Sam to see the BTs in the wilderness. In gameplay, she cries under stress or laughs/gurgles under delight. She has character, but can’t help feeling like an item — an extension of the game’s systems due to her lack of speech and lessened visibility during gameplay. It’s in the cutscenes and script where she really develops, the way intrigue is peppered about her through flashbacks, how Sam notes her absence in the chapter they are separated, the way one character notes how good of a team they are. She becomes more characterful, and clear that she is the one constant Sam cares about.
So of course the game ends with the threat of losing her. She’s decommissioned and must be incinerated, with little chance of surviving outside her pod. Sam almost goes through with it, and then it happens.
The ‘it’ is a flashback and probably Death Stranding’s best cutscene. The dialogue is sparser and the atmosphere more intriguing, showing us the flashback we’ve seen before in proper context. It reveals that Sam, not Lou, was the BB in those previous flashbacks. It shows the love that was given to Sam, the sacrifices others made so that he could be born, that he could live. Sam’s father tells him:
‘Dividing people was the only thing I was ever good at. But not you, Sam. You bring people together. You’re their bridge to the future… and mine.’
So of course Lou is saved/survives. Could it have gone any other way? Sam was given a second chance and he gives the same for her, creating a new life for them both outside the UCAs flawed technocracy. Death Stranding presents a world where care begets care and the possibilities that flourish when cultivated. It asks us to care even if we never receive credit, and pushes us to imagine the lengths someone went for you, and if you could do something similar.
And given everything going on, you probably should.
progress
When most games finish, I have little desire to replay them/see their post-game content. I didn’t feel like that about Death Stranding.
I jumped into the post-game and started delivering, but eventually focused on making all the roads on the game’s central map. I’ve been playing in little bits, gathering materials in one session and depositing them at a road maker in another. Despite not being the cargo Sam has been asked to deliver, my actions feel like they make dramaturgical sense. Sam is keeping himself busy. Sam is making progress.
Since the pandemic, so much of life seems based on a ‘when’ that has yet to arrive. I’m experiencing little variation in my day to day life, going to work, coming back, waking up in the night, doing a scrap of creative work that feels far from completion. It’s my routine rn. I want something — anything really — to break me from my current cycle of feelings.
But things aren’t static, not really. Death Stranding shows us progress is always being made. I remember resting in-game to fix my depleted stamina, the bar slowly creeping up as Sam slept, resting peacefully against his backpack. I found myself appreciating this time to slow down, taking in the image of Sam asleep in a field of rolling grass, moving the camera to see the scene from all angles. No time is wasted or misused, because there is always something you can do, always something developing, always something (crucially) you can choose to do. It shows the radical promise of games; that meaningful action exists outside work and that it could make up more of our lives, even superseding work (and capitalism) altogether.
Death Stranding isn’t always fun. It can be boring, stressful and ridiculous. But everything feels earned. The slowness of every journey always adds up to a sense of accomplishment. Even when the game tired me out, Ludwig Forsell’s score would bloom, reminding me of Sam’s place in the world and the importance of his (my?) actions. If I went on, things would be better. Near the end, in the knowledge another extinction event will take place, Sam says:
“Nothing lasts forever. Not even the world. But we gotta keep it going as long as we can, right? Patch the holes, change the parts, all that. So we can say we had a good run. That we lived.”
Death Stranding isn’t unique in this statement (‘I can’t go on I’ll go on’ comes to mind) but there aren’t many pieces of art that allow you to experience that; The exhaustion, the passing of time, the eventual ‘getting there’ moment where you look back on the road taken. It shows what’s possible, about committing to huge change. The game shows what that feels like, and that some good may come of it, all of us seemingly apart heading towards the same altruistic goal. Of course the game could go further with this message, but the seed is there. Its harsh optimism is one of the many reasons I think about the game still. One of the reasons I love it dearly.
As mentioned, I think about Death Stranding a lot. I think about it when a delivery man in China tests a support skeleton by carrying an immense amount of packages. I think about it when an UberEats rider passes by. I think about it when I see Ben Affleck holding a dog. I think about it at the end of the long day, backpack on, scanning the ground for trip hazards. I think about it when I play other games. I think about it whenever I think about the countryside, forests, waterfalls, and great plains. And I keep thinking about one of the UCA’s peppy slogans, one that grates on me the least.
Keep on keeping on.
I hope you are able to do the same too. You deserve it.
Keep on keeping on.
