Among gaming’s recurring insecurities is the inherent disconnect between a player’s physically complex actions on screen (like a jump, an attack, etc) and their otherwise simple, unary representations on an input device (a button press). You can pin much of gaming's zeitgeist in the mid-aughts as a response to this by attempting to expand the player's input range to match their in-game actions: the exploration of motion controls is the obvious example, though the one that comes to mind here is David Cage’s experiments with “cinematic” player input. Much of Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain comes across as an attempt to parallelize the player's input to a filmographic form: having the player open a door not with a button push but a semicircular turn of the analog stick, to put the player in the shoes of an actor on set turning the knob. Of course, anyone who's suffered through the Simon Says QTEs in Indigo Prophecy knows this experiment was a failure. In a sort of ironic inversion of the situation above (complex actions mapped to simple inputs), the indulgent range of input in Cage’s games only brings to stark awareness the relative flatness of their application in-game. I’d argue even that this disconnect serves as the games’ biggest source of unintentional humor and not the bad scriptwriting, when the most mundane actions are brought into intense cinematic relief by the overengineered input scheme. Which of course clashes with the fact that you’re not really having any effect on the on-screen action outside of throwing out cue cards: you’re not the actor here, you’re the stage director of a middling high school play.
It’s going to sound sacrilegious to compare Cage’s games with Death Stranding; and don’t worry, Death Stranding is for all its faults way better than anything Cage can crank out. The vision here is more interesting as well: where Cage’s motive comes across as a shoehorned filmographic translation of gameplay, Death Stranding tackles a more compelling problem unique to video games proper: how a player traverses through a game’s world. In any competent pre-millenium shooter or platformer, traversal is tightly mapped to the texture and grit of a given level; it's the complex multiplicative product of numerous emergent variables (enemy type/count, lanes of enemy fire, etc). As the domain of video game worlds has expanded into its modern open world form, though, traversal has been reduced down to a unary input: time. Which is to say that Skyrim and company are less interested in nature as a densely layered terra firma and more as a neutral, temporal vector between points of interest. The sense of scale of seeing a great mountain in Skyrim is dampened when you realize the only thing separating you from its summit is putting 5 minutes of your time into the coin slot and watching your character climb it. And so Death Stranding asks: what if climbing a mountain actually felt like scaling up a 10k+ foot tall slab of rock, complete with all the friction such a feat entails?
But the problem here is that Death Stranding insists on still seeing traversal as mere time expenditure rather than a potential locus of ability. Each of its mechanics meant to induce a higher level of involvement (all of which, to be fair, are good ideas on the surface) are paper tigers: deabstracting the player's inventory into an actual physical object on their back subject to balance and wind drag feels like an excellent idea, until you realize that you can just hold both triggers to perfectly balance it without issue; needing to find a navigable route through the game's terrain seems like an interesting challenge, until you realize that Sam can scale up and down nearly any nonvertical slope if you keep the analog stick steady enough. Obstacles like rivers are rarely ever treacherous enough to be an issue, and resources to deal with them are doled out in floods. Playing Death Stranding is like slowly climbing out of Plato’s cave to reveal a game that's not nearly as interested in challenging or engaging you as the first couple hours promised, and at almost every point of the game I found myself amazed at how little teeth it has (“you mean timefall only damages the container my cargo is in and not the cargo itself?”, “you mean touching a BT doesn't actually instakill you, despite the game scaring me into thinking that?”, “you mean falling and dropping my cargo barely even damages it, even on the hardest difficulty setting?”). The result is a game that isn't actually interested in recontextualizing world traversal as much as it is peppering it with ancillary David Cage-ish rituals (balancing your cargo, pacing yourself through rough terrain, consoling your BB, etc), all meant to give the illusion of a dramatic performance without the mechanical rigor needed to draw the player into the mindset of the actor. At its core, you're just walking between Far Cry radio towers like usual but, like, at a slower pace.
Perhaps a more charitable assessment of the game is that, in its conception of traversal, its intent is not to supplement the act of time expenditure but rather to more meticulously sculpt it in a sort of meditative Tarkovskian sense: mountains and ravines in Death Stranding are more like duration-objects. In a sense, the greatest challenge that Death Stranding offers the player is the need for patience, and much of the game’s eccentricities begin to make more sense when viewed under this thesis. Which of course begs the question of why a game based around patience needs so many obsessive dopamine-clinging optimization loops. We don't even hit the double digits in hour count before this thing starts dropping vehicles and other diet-MGSV goodies that sabotage any need to patiently consider the gameworld (not that there was much need to, anyway). Even on its own terms I find this system design to be greatly lacking. Very few of the unlocks you’re given are anything other than uniform “solutions” to another of the game’s quickly dwindling variables - BTs for example are barely even registered as a threat before hematic grenades are introduced to take care of them - and by the time you're given the game's equivalent of an F-150 Raptor (approx. 15 hours in), you're invited to steamroll through everything without issue. Out of curiosity, I took half an hour to scroll through the Death Stranding subreddit (don’t recommend doing that by the way) to see if maybe I was missing out on some creative application of the game's tools: I saw one person use two ladders as a makeshift bridge for their vehicle, to which the game’s physics engine promptly rejected and flipped out the second they touched the ladder, so uh there’s that.
Ironically, for a game based around technology’s role in mindfully bridging gaps between people, I found this ramping power curve to be a damning retort to it. With each new vehicle and upgrade, I felt my mental landing gear lifting off the ground, further away from the landscape and the people I'm helping as I drift into dissociative fugue. My actions shifted from the numerous back down to the unary, my input mapped across a broad range of actions stripped down to just the gas pedal. Soon enough, I've transformed myself into a subordinate agent of the tasks hoisted upon me by my technological devices: the road began to dictate the path rather than the other way around. It’s such a compelling dissonance with the game's themes that for the first half of the game I actually thought this was the point, that The Guy Who Directed Metal Gear Solid 2 was intentionally playing into this and was going to drop some narrative bombshell with quotes from La Technique ou l'Enjeu du Siècle at me or something. Of course this never happens. There is an air of Debordian recuperation in how Death Stranding juggles its political themes with a poppy glee; the UCA state apparatus being synonymized with the chiral network as imagined communities would hit more if the game had much of anything critical to say about them. Perhaps I’m overreaching my analysis or missing out on something the game is saying - if I’m being a snob here, please feel free me to call me out - but Death Stranding’s depiction of a society fractured by a lack of technological infrastructure spearheaded by a national entity is, if not egregiously naive, then at least very bizarre in the Current Year, and soured much of the goodwill I had about the game’s message of connecting. It’s only fitting that the primary currency of connection in the game is Likes, a unit of goodwill stripped clean of its emotional content and atomized to a meaningless magnitude; not unlike on the real internet!
I’ve restrained myself from mentioning the game’s auteurial nature because frankly I find dwelling on that sort of thing to be tedious beyond measure, but it’s going to pop up here because Death Stranding is obviously a very auteurial game. But not in the way I’m entirely satisfied with. There’s this sort of latent self-exasperation Death Stranding has with itself, this constant need to justify and explain itself, that gives the impression of a game studio desperately wrangling with the sheer symbological density of its director’s ideas: check this cutscene as an example of a scene that feels like it’s about to burst to the seams with iconography. And often it does burst, overfilling into the rest of the game in the form of tedious “lore” emails and dry codecs. For what it’s worth, the game does has the ability to display some pretty damn good scene direction when the studio’s on the same page: the scene that introduces Heartman in his lab might be my favorite for its clever premise, pristine balance of humor and drama, and James Rolfe’s Darren Jacob’s uncanny ability to realize the game’s Ancient Aliens-ass natural history into something believable and profound. (It’s also one of the few scenes in the game with, like, actual stage blocking; so many cutscenes in this game are just 2-4 people standing around in an empty room talking to each other.) For the most part, though, the strings here are getting pulled by a group of people whose aesthetic range can be circumscribed by the average Netflix Original sci-fi series. The majority of the game is delivered with a hazy eyed drunkenness, with all the emotional particularity of a perfume advertisement (the soundtrack in particular is pretty awful; I am not enamored with whatever Radiohead cover band they licensed for this). Fragile is pretty insufferable; Higgs is a nothing character that feels like an excuse to give Troy Baker a check; Mama threatens to be the only female character presumably written by a human being before she's thrust back into the trauma mines the second you meet her in person. Mads Mikkelsen covered head-to-toe in ink doing a Kubrick stare is hot as fuck, though, I'll give them that. The game’s redeemed somewhat by the last few hours, which are admittedly pretty good. I was reminded of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening here, where the sheer density of plot elements collapses into an event horizon and logic gives way to a hushed emotional clairvoyance. It's one of the only parts of the game to do it for me, and it's backed up with some pretty cool imagery: Sam endlessly running in Amelie's beach like he's noclipped into a dev room is a personal favorite. It’s a vital unmasking of the game, an unmasking I sadly wish the rest of the game could have partaken in.