Date : 2021-02-13 Entry ID : 11567 Game ID : 2303
Overall, I think Death Stranding is a great game, and original to its core. The gameplay is intentionally slow and the actions you're performing are the opposite of action-packed. However, great care and attention has been given to how these tasks are performed to make them nuanced and satisfying. You explore maps that are lonely and desolate, yet very beautifully rendered.
The world of Death Stranding is nuts in a typical Kojima-like fashion, but it has a quiet melancholic tone that is unique for this game. It is also intensely surreal: babies in bottles, teleportation umbrellas, flying tar whales, floating highways with rocks floating in the air. This level of surrealism seems rare in modern games. The character drama mainly unfolds through relatively few cutscenes, many of them close to the end of the game. It doesn't work for me. Even though I think the faces in this game are rendered and animated better than anything I have seen in games so far, the characters that are portrayed don't have emotional resonance. The best example of this is Die-Hardman's emotional scene with Sam near the end of the game. He breaks down with tears dripping from his eyes in what should be a very effective acting performance. The face of Die-Hardman is incredibly well-rendered, with perfect eye movement, and even down to intricate details in the furrows of his eyebrow. However, nothing has been done in the game to make this a character the player should care about. After playing for 70 hours, this is the first time we see the character's face, as well as the first time we see him exhibit any form of emotion. The resulting feeling is awkward: we're seeing scene that *seems* like it should be very emotional, but for a character that means nothing to us. So the storytelling is not always great, but what did work for me was the quiet, underplayed bond between Sam and his Bridge Baby Lou. Lou is always there, doing cute baby things that are hard not to enjoy, and Sam clearly misses his adoptive child when he's taken away, shown in a few quiet moments where Sam forgets that Lou is gone and speaks to her, and then realizing she's gone, and goes quiet. This is effective video game storytelling, and it involves characters that have been on the screen for hours and hours. Ultimately, even though the drama doesn't always work, the story and world was fascinating enough to keep my attention securely locked through a very long game.
Even with the caveats about the character drama, Death Stranding has a lot to enjoy. A game with this level of originality that still has high production values is rare. For this reason, Death Stranding will stand out in gaming history for years to come.