Here’s the 2019 action game Death Stranding. It’s the work of industry legend Hideo Kojima, famous for his influential Metal Gear Solid series with Japanese developer Konami.

He split acrimoniously from Konami in 2015 and turned to Kojima Productions, with this the first project to emerge from his studio.

And it is one peculiar video game indeed. Despite its issues, we grew to like it a good deal and it’s provided us with some interesting talking points.

Lots of Walking in Death Stranding (but in a pretty good way)

With regard to adapting Death Stranding into a movie, Hideo Kojima said this:

“I made Death Stranding to be a game, and games are games. There’s no real need to turn them into films. So in a way, the Death Stranding movie is taking a direction that nobody has tried before with a movie adaptation of a game.”

We highlight that as it’s an odd statement given what this game is.

For the first solid hour of Death Stranding we were left wondering if we were actually playing a video game. It’s just one long bit of narrative exposition and cut-scenes (i.e. a film) made tolerable by the studio hiring talented actors to fulfil the lead roles.

That’s most notable in the form of Walking Dead star Norman Reedus.

Otherwise, in those 60 minutes there’s about three minutes of gameplay. And that just involves pushing forward on the control stick to make your character, Sam (voiced by Reedus), run.

That’s it. That’s the first hour of the game.

Thankfully… the story is engaging enough, and the voice acting not horrific (as it so often is in video games), so we stuck with Death Stranding. And we’re going to try and summarise the plot in bullet point form:

• Set in a dystopian US after an unexplained cataclysmic event, there are Beached Things (BTs) that are invisible evil animals that prowl about the land.
• Sam Porter is a delivery man who delivers all sorts of essentials to underground communities.
• The BTs produce Timefall rain that ages any living thing it touches.
• The BTs also want to eat human corpses, but when they do this causes a huge “voidout” nuclear explosion.
• As Sam Porter, you have to use a BB womb simulation pod to carry around a premature baby that’s in a state between life and death.
• A condition called DOOMS lets Sam…

You get the picture. The story is a glorified zombie apocalypse, adapted in convoluted fashion so it soon gets a bit annoying.

As Sam Porter, you have to waltz across beautifully desolate landscapes and deliver goods to communities. That’s the game! Here it is in action.

Cripes, so a huge chunk of the game is just walking. This is made more complex than in the mediocre mess that is Starfield (2023) as it’s entertaining walking.

There’s something rather enjoyable about trekking across these landscapes to deliver goods, basking in the solitude and dealing with unpleasant scenarios as and when they arise.

One of the downsides to this is there’s a fiddly control system that, even after hours of play, just didn’t seem to want to work properly. As if the instructions from the game are deliberately wrong.

Sam also stumbles and falls a lot. Plus, the endless intricacies of the game mechanics thrown at you come thick and fast and are impossible to remember.

This can make the game very frustrating. Although that gives way frequently enough for some serious highs, where you’re enjoying the solitude and overcoming the landscape ahead of you.

There’s also a fantastic little concept involving collaboration between other players in their, respective, gaming experience.

You can build helpful structures for other players to use and, in their game world, they can discover these items that’ll help them progress. And they can thank you for your efforts. There’s no reason to do that, you don’t get a reward. It’s just for the sake of being nice.

And we like that a lot.

On the other side of things, there’s also no denying the game looks beautiful. Look at it. Stunning! This is part of the trekking appeal, you can’t complain with those sweeping landscapes and moody vistas.

You’ve got all that, balancing your packages with the weird control system, and then the game throws some combat at you. Later on you get some vehicles to drive around with.

It’s an odd game for many reasons. Sometimes in a good way, but regularly in a kind of baffling way.

For example, we’ve got to note there’s a bizarre product placement for Monster Energy drinks. We can’t help but wince at this bit.

All just for a bit of sponsorship money. How many easily influenced kids and teenagers played this and decided to down full sugar Monsters because of this game?

It’s every bit as bad as that bit in World War Z when Brad Pitt totally naturally decides to have a Pepsi and, no, that doesn’t take you out of the film and, no, totally isn’t product placement at all either.

Kojima has said he thinks Death Stranding has inspired a new gaming genre. We don’t agree with him there and such a statement is a bit… well, up his own arse.

You can’t just ramp up what AAA games have been doing for ages (turning blockbuster games into blockbuster movies) and then claim that’s a totally new genre of game.

We could say full credit to Kojima for trying something a bit different. But Death Stranding isn’t innovative. This is just a film/game hybrid with a very heavy emphasis on film.

We’ve droned on in the past about how AAA games lost us over a decade ago as most are now more like watching a crap film than playing a video game. But we’ve tried a few recently as a change to our playing habits. Just to see if anything new is going on.

Death Stranding has a lot of issues and isn’t the work of genius many in the gaming industry are pretending it is. But it is a good game.

It offers intriguing gameplay mechanics and a decent story. Bloody hell, though, does it take itself too seriously.

If you think you can stick with it, especially for the opening five solid hours of exposition, what emerges is quite an effective action game.

The Critical Reaction to Death Stranding

We’re baffled by the press reaction to this one. As with Bethesda’s pretty mediocre Starfield recently, many publications inexplicably hailed Death Stranding as a 10/10 masterpiece.

We can only presume they want to do so as it adds profundity to the industry and they can wave this around as a piece of art and claim video games aren’t just for kids.

That’s conjecture, but the alternative is they just think Death Stranding is an exceptional video game. Which it most certainly isn’t.

An example review is from Mollie L. Patterson in Electronic Gamer Monthly. She handed over 5/5 and noted:

“What Death Stranding is, though, is a work that can truly claim to be something different in a time of overwhelming sameness. It’s a game that isn’t afraid to be unconventional at times and mundane at others, and which benefits from a willingness to be both. Death Stranding makes me glad that Hideo Kojima makes video games—because our hobby would be boring as hell without him.”

The distinction should have been made for the AAA scene. As yes, Kojima’s game does try something a bit different to what your average blockbuster title does.

But if you look at the indie game scene and the vibrant creativity going on there, you won’t find much overwhelming sameness. The scene is wildly innovative.

And does Death Stranding really do anything different to the AAA norm? We’d argue no. Not really. It just ramps up the mundane and number of cutscenes (and also adds in a dedicated urination action).

To balance out the max scores, Giant Bomb handed over 2/5 and noted:

“Kojima’s first post-Konami project is a bizarre, self-indulgent mess that never quite manages to tie its myriad pieces together.”

It is bizarre and self-indulgent, but we do think it manages to balance itself out to offer some worth to players. But credit to this reviewer for saying it as he felt it.

As opposed to handing over these curious 10/10 scores.

Alongside this and the praise Starfield has received this month, our distrust of AAA game reviews continues to grow.