Putting in the Work: Death Stranding and the Beauty of Giving a Shit
The first step in enjoying Death Stranding is accepting that it is weird as shit. The second is knowing that most things, odd as the explanations might be, will be explained to you eventually. Actually, a lot of the parts that feel esoteric and impenetrable are actually extremely simple. The game is overwritten and highly artful and this can create in the player the belief that things must be more so much more complicated than they seem — often, the opposite is true, things look a lot more complicated than they are.
One of the subtle ways the location feels a weird place to be from the first step you take is the disconnection between the look and feel of it and the repeated assertions that this is America. It doesn’t look like America as we’ve come to recognise it in the popular imagination, there are no lonesome dusty roads or stretches of flat prairie. This place is all verdant green hills and craggy, volcanic rock below grey skies — it doesn’t even feel like an America of the far future after years of conflict and degradation, it looks like Iceland, one of the key inspirations for its landscape, which somehow atmospherically feels like the furthest possible point from how we usually view America. For me, this is a stroke of genius. If the game is going to narratively use the lofty ideas of America (freedom, hope, liberty) in an abstract, universalist kind of way like it does, it makes sense for it to feel like an abstract kind of place. There’s talk about the UCA (United Cities of America), sure, but the environment, the characters and most of the narrative are so far removed from the actual USA that you never really have to contend with your feelings on America in all its nuances and complexities of spirit.
The complexities of American values are a little too much for this game to contend with, so I’m glad it doesn’t really try to. For me, the simplicity of theme is what makes the story so endearing. Cutscenes being weird for their own sake; silly, highly literal character names and hilariously bad lines like the much vilified, “no, like Mario and Princess Beach” don’t bother me because I don’t think they take away from the heart of what this game is trying to say: connection is everything, human beings need each other, and even in this extremely weird universe complete with giant, world-altering monsters, positive change can only be made by small degrees and the will to try and forge these connections.
So, I really like this game on pretty much every level, but I have to make it clear why I fully understand why many other people would feel the opposite. As a piece of art and as a mechanical play experience, Death Stranding is not at all afraid to turn you off. It challenges your patience for a few different things: extended cutscenes, odd happenings that won’t be explained for many hours, complicated menu systems and fiddly, frustrating busywork. I would’ve assumed a lot of this stuff would turn me off too.
Turns out, I really like fiddly, frustrating busywork. The first time I played the game I got through it as quickly as possible as I usually do, impatient to see the story play out. It’s always on the second playthrough that I bother with the minutiae. I bothered to figure out zip lines, I delivered packages I didn’t have to and I built all the roads, which requires a huge amount of materials that are difficult to transport without, well, roads. Actually, I don’t think anything better exemplifies what this game is ultimately asking of you than the building of the road network. Do you want to make things significantly easier for yourself? Well, you have to put the time in, you have to care to figure out the logistics of finding and moving all these materials, you have to be willing to retread ground over and over, to persist even when your truck battery dies in the middle of a fucking river. Most importantly, you have to care that these packages get delivered, that people get the stuff they need — the only reason to build the roads is to ease the delivery of these packages. That’s what the game is asking, how much do you care? How willing are you to both buy into the ideals of the game and how willing are you to actually, in real life, turn on your console and spend the hours it takes to live up to those ideals? I surprised myself by how much I did care in the end.
Thinking about the extra time I put into this game to complete tasks I did not need to, I realised the kind of challenge I’m sometimes looking for out of games. Rebuilding the roads on Death Stranding is the kind of challenge that I like. I don’t have to actually be good at anything to do it, I don’t have to have quick reflexes or the will to figure out the best way to approach a boss battle, I just have to have the will and the time to transport the materials to where they’re needed, over and over. It reminded me of why I put so much time into Fallout 4. A lot of my time in that game was spent in the settlement system, rebuilding each place, getting it fit for settlers and then creating supply lines from one to another. The satisfaction I felt at the end of that felt a lot like it did when I finished the roads and had a good zip line system through the mountains in Death Stranding: I could look at the map, feel satisfied that I’d put the time in to make things in the game better for myself, my character, other characters in the world and in Death Stranding’s case, other players.
The way the game succeeds in forging little connections between players who will most likely never talk to each other is one of my favourite things about the game. If you build something in the game, a bridge over harsh waters, a ladder and rope system up a craggy path, there’s a chance it might end up in someone else’s game. I can’t tell you how many times a well-placed ladder or battery charging station was something I was genuinely, real-life, pleased to see. In a game that generally involves getting from one place to another, someone making that ‘getting’ easier for you, whether they meant to or not, makes you actually grateful to that person. I just think it’s a mechanic that’s for lack of a better word, sweet. I spam the ‘like’ button and hope they see it, and I enjoy it when I get likes myself, when I see that people have used my road and are happy with me for building it. It’s just neat. We’ve connected in this tiny way, real humans in our separate homes: I made your journey easier, you made mine easier, isn’t that nice?
No matter how silly the narrative can get and how much cutscenes can feel interminably long, I really find it hard to ever be actually mad at this game, and that is because of its ultimate commitment to goodness. I think it’s less about its oddities than it is its simplicities — Heartman or Deadman’s names and their backstories are strange and interesting in their ways, but your emotional connection to them comes from how much they so clearly come to care about Sam, and how much Sam, you, cares about them in turn. The oddities are an artistic choice, but they’re not really the point of the thing.
In many games, you are ostensibly the good guy, but if the core of the game is combat, well, you might kill a tonne of people. This is fine, maybe you just suspend your disbelief so you can have a good time, maybe the narrative makes your actions righteously justified, but another extremely clever thing Death Stranding does is make killing people actually the worst option. No matter how much a narrative might make it clear that murder is bad, it’s hard to break years of gameplay habit where killing is often the first and foremost reaction to an enemy coming at you. Moral consequences only matter if you’re so invested that you will resist the instinct to kill, which most people just aren’t, (if it would have made getting through those MULE’s and closer to my precious ceramics easier, I would’ve killed them, trust me). Death Stranding’s solution is to make killing someone annoying. By killing someone, you create consequences that are actually going to be bothersome to you the player on a mechanical level. You’ll either create a voidout that you have to deal with, or you’ll have to drive the body to an incinerator, of which there are few. Might as well use rubber bullets, then, make things easier for yourself and sleep at night knowing you’re not an indiscriminate murderer as a nice side benefit.
There’s a reason that most of what you do in the game is walk, deliver packages, figure out the best routes so you can help the most people get what they need — it’s not some horrible oversight on Kojima’s part, he and his team didn’t suddenly forget that this is not normally how AAA games go. This game is about the exhausting work, the tedium of trying to make things better; either you’re willing to stack piles of vital cargo on your back, strap it to your body until you can barely move, and then put one boot in front of the other, or you’re not. It’s also about the rewards for doing this. The big reward is that you might save the world, but the strongest delights are in the small ones: being hugged by your friend, touching foreheads with another, forging connections, building bridges, ‘other players are pleased with you.’
