Yakuza has always been a series that has had a penchant for testing the limits of the player's suspension of disbelief.

Yakuza 4 doesn’t so much disregard the notion as it does it does take it out behind the shed and shoot it in the face with a twelve gauge. It pushes suspension of disbelief to its absolute breaking point.

Rubber bullets have to be one of the most egregious contrivances I’ve witnessed and the game asks you to let it slide not once, not twice, but three times; with the final rug pull being the most intellectually insulting of the bunch.

The story is so preoccupied with stuffing twists and betrayals into its narrative that are unveiled at a blistering pace that it fails to see how the narrative collapses under its own weight.

Throw in encounter design that would test the patience of a saint—what with many encounters boiling down to trading chip damage for minutes on end— and you got yourself the worst game in the series.

Once, there was an explosion, a bang that gave rise to life as we know it. And then, came the next explosion. An explosion that will be our last.

Those words from the opening of Hideo Kojima’s epic Death Stranding sat in the back of my head for the nearly 70 hours I spent playing the game. Kojima always has an underlying message with his projects and for some reason, those lines, among the hundreds of others within the dialogue, were the ones that stuck with me.

Even after getting the gist of the game's message midway through, it wasn’t until the game reached its twilight moments that I fully comprehended this quote’s gravity.

Death Stranding is a game that has been divisive for many reasons. Some won’t find anything appealing about the “Fed Ex simulator” as it has been mockingly reduced to and some find Kojima’s ego grating. Those are all fair assessments, but I think some people may be missing the point.

In this game, nothing is superfluous. In many open-world titles, which have littered the release windows this generation, all the emphasis is on the destinations. Rarely is time given to contextualize the game’s world. Open worlds merely serve to artificially extend the experience out, a sandbox that exists instead of thoughtful level design.

This couldn’t be further from the truth for Death Stranding.

In Death Stranding, gameplay consists of delivering items between destinations and encouraging denizens, existing in the wake of an apocalypse that has destroyed America, to join a new nation and become part of a connected network. You must efficiently adjust your inventory for optimal weight distribution while simultaneously traversing through hazardous territory that can range from swamps, rocky hills, and blizzard-laden mountain peaks that would make Everest shudder.

What happens at point A and point B is important, for sure. The people you make deliveries to are grateful for and eventually join the network you’re creating during your trek from the East to the West Coast of America. But the real meat and potatoes of the game is the experience of what happens during the journey.

Whereas navigating worlds in other games is often an afterthought — a way to artificially extend the experience — it is the game in Death Stranding. Some have compared it to walking simulators like Gone Home. But even in those games, the walking only serves to vector the player between items and points of interest. All of the exposition will occur when reaching these locations but nothing really occurs between them.

Every aspect of the gameplay is methodical. You have to plan ahead and decide what tools are most important since they take up weight just like the cargo you will be carrying. You can be thrown off balance by rocks, slopes, or water. You can run out of stamina while trying to balance your load and end up dropping and damaging it. Mercenaries can try to steal it or even kill you. Every moment of this game demands your attention and engagement.

I expected Death Stranding to be a statement of games not needing to be fun to be good, like Spec Ops: The Line or Depression Quest. But that wasn’t the case.

Death Stranding is a blast. All of the game’s meticulous mechanics and contextualization result in an addictive, rewarding gameplay loop that shaved hours off my days before I realized it.

When playing Death Stranding, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus came to mind. Camus’s central argument is that in the face of overwhelming adversity and the apparent insignificance one person’s existence may have, shouldn’t individuals just kill themselves? Get it over with? If there’s no purpose, if the universe is apathetic to our struggles, then why bother? What’s the point?

Camus analogizes this futility with the Greek tale of Sisyphus, a being who is cursed by the gods to carry a boulder up a hill by day only to have it fall down at night. Then to do it again every day for eternity. Given the burden he incessantly carries on his shoulders and the futility of his actions, one could assume him miserable.

But in rejecting nihilistic thoughts and finding purpose in the actions he can control, defining his own existence, and moving forward even when something might seem fruitless, one can imagine Sisyphus happy.
Comparatively, when Sam Bridges, the player character, feels what he is doing may serve no purpose, he carries on. He also does so in the face of nihilistic antagonists such as Higgs, who is aware of a systematic disaster that will end all life. His motivation is to expedite humanity’s extinction in the face of its inevitable end.

This brings us back to that opening quote. Near the end of the game, I realized Death Stranding was a commentary on the global climate crisis – that this seemingly inescapable calamity facing our planet means we should probably just not care.

But Death Stranding says otherwise.

There is a purpose in the struggle. Purpose in the moment-to-moment decisions we make. Purpose in the relationships we build with those around us.

One of the core gameplay mechanics is asynchronous multiplayer. If I reach an obstacle, I can use one of my tools to build a bridge to cross a ravine or drop a rope to rappel down a cliff. These things you left behind by you will appear in other players’ games to offer them relief if they don’t share the same tools to build what’s necessary. It speaks to a level of communal effort.

This ties into the game’s social system of “likes.” Players can click a dedicated like button, resulting in positive reinforcement and doubling the same appreciation that non-player characters have for Sam and the player by extension.

Norman Reedus’s performance as Sam and Mads Mikkelson’s as Cliff Unger are outstanding. Well-acted and voiced, the characters all feel human. Kojima’s camera work rivals that of some film directors, and the attention to detail is staggering.

The relationship with BB, your infantile companion who can sense the BTs (who are made of a substance very similar in appearance and viscosity to oil), the game’s main antagonistic force, was genuine. I ended up caring about BB as if they were a real person. One of the most poignant moments in the game involves the culmination of Sam and BB’s relationship, which came after the narrative climax and had me reaching for tissues.

Death Stranding is flawed, as all games are. The script can be clunky, and Kojima’s penchant for convoluted character development still remains. However, the genius of Death Stranding is in its confrontation of existence which captures the essence of the digital age by using gameplay to manifest our collective pathos.

What I took from this game is that though things might seem bleak, none of us are alone in our struggles. We have to take things day by day and work together towards building a future and that a better world is always possible.

Nothing is truly futile and all we have is us.

Beaten on Maximum Security. This is VERY much a 'mixed' review, but I think someone who hasn't played Dead Space before would enjoy it more than I did.

I'm a huge fan of the Dead Space series, apart from... well, the obvious one. So I was pretty excited about this game. Was it worth it? ...Kind of. Largely, as much as I maybe shouldn't, I'm going to be comparing this game to Dead Space 1 and 2 generally.

Much of my problems come from the fact that I find the game to be a bit of a regression from Dead Space 2, and the game's primary combat loop being unsatisfying to both use and master, and the horror elements being only 'okay'.

This might be a bit of a hot take, but I've always been on the opinion that Dead Space 2 absolutely windmill dunks on Dead Space 1, from horror to gameplay to atmosphere. And the reason for that is because I've always viewed the IP as something more closer to splatter films than I do your typical horror might be. The games have always... not been very subtle. They don't build tension for very long before blaring trumpets and noise at you. Not that the series can't, indeed the abandoned tram in the later chapters of 2 proves it can, but it often is contrasted with limbs and fervor.

Dead Space's horror, has, largely, been about the 'frenzy' form. A confusion of sounds and stimulus and worry of 'what the hell is going to come next'. The pants-shitting moments, as they were, in the original games are when you hear an AI go "lockdown in process." or something similar, as you know the next few minutes of your life are going to involve alot of things trying to eat you. The game's are 'scary', but they aren't about a continual build of tension. This is largely why I think Dead Space 2 is better, with its huge enemy variety (shoutouts to the raptor encounters especially) and better contrast. It leans into the chaos (even if, yes, the iron man stunts are a bit silly, im not gonna pretend they arent) and contrasts it better with nightmare visions, quiet terror. Where as Dead Space 1 likes to >think< its building up tension, but pays it off way too fast and way too often. It has a heightened sense of 'general' tension for most of the game, but there's clear safe rooms, and it often dispels it's own attempts at scaring the player by overplaying its hand.

Now, I've talked a whole damn lot and have only really talked about dead space. What does any of this have to do with Callisto Protocol, beyond the obvious 'the dead space guys made it.' Well, because for all intents and purposes, this game is Dead Space 1.5. It's got that industrial, nostromo-alien feel to it for the vast majority of the game, a lot of the 'they're in the walls/vents/what have you' atmosphere to it, and it has much more of an emphasis on general tension than specific scares. Even the way Jacob is constantly looking over his shoulder reminds me of how Isaac would look in space 1.

And this certainly isn't a bad thing; Black Iron keeps the series speciality of being very well thought out and practical. You can see how the prison functions, even during its destruction. And I think it nails its atmosphere better than Dead Space 1 ever did. The problem is that not only do I feel like it took a step back from Dead Space 2, which meshed its horror elements much better and made them something that made sense for the splatter film type goreshow the games rightfully are, it kept the problems of the original dead space 1.

An example. Early in the game, you are crawling through a small squeeze while you come face to face with a webbed up, infected corpse. You get a pretty good close look at it. The eye of the corpse shoots open to follow Jacob as hes leaving the squeeze. This is a pretty creepy moment, but ruined by the extremely loud blaring of noise and orchestra that happens right when the eye opens. The Dead Space devs struggle to hold it in their pants for longer than a few minutes before needing to shout over the clifftops at that something scary is approaching. It's only when they go after long, singular chapters of quiet that it works. This 'general' tension thats supposed to linger over the whole game never works, because dead space is by its core, a loud splatter film.

So what about the gameplay? A mixed bag. Gone are the inventive and unique armory of Dead Space 1, of mining equipment turned arsenal, or the high powered sci-fi military equipment of 2. Instead we have the most basic, unimaginative weapons possible. Pistol, shotgun, assault rifle. Woopie.

The biggest question mark with the gameplay, however, is the melee system. Essentially the game locks you into a soft QTE with every enemy you face. Everything is dodged by holding a directional button. No timing element. This makes avoiding attacks >extremely< easy when it comes to 1 enemy, barely even a threat. When another enemy gets involved, one of two things happens; the other enemy will sit, and wait its turn like a good little Not!Necromorph, or they will try and hit you during this soft QTE. If they do, and you've already pressed the attack button, then oops, you're getting hit with no input, because once you press the attack button nothing on gods earth is stopping you from finishing it. This leads to the gameplay, especially in the first few hours, to be tedious. Things will only ever hit you if you've accidentally committed to something without seeing an attack or out of vision, because its impossible to fail otherwise. Rarely does damage you receive feel like a mistake as much as it does your little brother taking your controller out of your hands in the middle of a QTE.

Also, sadly, gone is the system of upgrading. Power nodes are gone, instead you inject money directly into the gun to make it stronger. It's not a terrible idea, but I found power nodes to be much more satisfying as a reward for exploration and tinkering around where you maybe shouldn't be. The monetary rewards you get in this game... never feel like enough up until the third act, where it suddenly showers you in it right before the final boss.

So... overall, do I recommend this? I don't know. I can't really help but feel disappointed as someone who likes dead space 1 and adores dead space 2, this game feels like a lot of missed opportunity. But we don't get much survival horror, especially not at this production quality. And while the game is clunky at times and derivative in a bad way in others, it's also artistically sound, with a strong atmosphere and great, haunting area to explore. Maybe that's all you need. I suspect it will be for most people.

(I literally just copied my steam review lol)

The motto of gamefreak - For every 1 step forward, make 2 grand leaps backwards.

Though truthfully, at this point I can't blame them anymore. I have to wonder if gamefreak has any control over the game at all. Pokemon games are essentially mandated to come out at a certain time to follow along with the anime schedule, and will NEVER be delayed, so any internal conflicts and problems are never allowed to be polished. Not only that, gamefreak only has what, 130 employees? Incredibly small for a game studio. You have to start wondering if the suits at the top of the pokemon chain see the games as anything more than a formality.

Okay, with that bit aside, hows the game? Mid. Very, very mid. It's a significant increase from gen 8's absolute disaster that was the wild area, but it's overall a mixed bag. A bunch of interesting ideas on paper with the most basic execution possible on every front.

The open world of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet essentially amounts to a large square of tall grass, with lots of pokeballs strewn about, and some palette swaps every now and then. There's nothing really to do except hunt trainers, which are nice loot baskets of EXP for your team, and go from story progress to story progress, and catch pokemon, and do raid battles. You know, same ol same ol, except much wider distances.

There was one thing I was interested in initially - the towers that gold the Gimmighoul chests and coins. Imagine my surprise! A reward for exploring! A small reward, sure, but it was working towards an evolution for a... weirdly designed but strong as hell pokemon! And... you need 999 coins. And theres nothing else like it in the game. Shame on me.

As far as the paths go, all of them are... okay. Maybe a hot take though, but I think the totem pokemon and ultra necrozma from gen 7 absolutely windmill dunk over this games attempt at big 'boss' pokemon. The titans as they are... have nothing that differentiate them from being just a large grass pokemon. No gimmick, no field, no stat changes, nothing. At the very least I thought the story strong of Arven, while cliche and obvious, was at least... nice to see conclude? It's decent relative to pokemon, I guess.

Likewise same for the team star path, which are a combination of gym + titan, where you fight a big car. These fights are decently fun, but preluded by 2 minutes of time wasting and making you comprehend your life choices as you stand around and mash the R button without paying attention. I'm not at all sure what the design intent of this part of the game is. It's like a mario party minigame.

The gyms themselves are your usual affair, but maybe more depressing of the game is the sad state of the towns. They have themes and personality, but it's truly sad how there is NOTHING to do in any of them. You can't even go inside most of the houses, there's barely any npcs to talk to... you just buy the few pieces of costume customization you can (because gamefreak decided to axe a thing people liked which is their usual) you just show up, beat a gym, and then leave, without ever doing anything. ANYTHING.

What we're left with is essentially a standard pokemon game gaining some, and losing other, features and ideas from others. There's some original ideas but nothing in the game tries to use it in any interesting way. This isn't even going into the massive performance problems the game suffers from.

Honestly, the main reason I'm not rating this game lower is because I think competitively this gen has some potential to be pretty fun in both singles and doubles, and it IS better than gen 8. But overall, this is not a good path for pokemon to take.

I'll also repeat myself from my other pokemon reviews: Gen 5 and 7 for life.

Death Stranding has not left my thoughts ever since finishing it in early 2020, and oh man, what a perfect game indeed to start off that cursed year. Directorial legend Hideo Kojima once again flexes his eerie powers of prescience in his first post-Konami independent project, creating a fictional world that would, only a few months after release, reach unforeseen levels of resonance with a global audience suddenly thrust into the grim reality of having to deal with a historic pandemic under late stage capitalism. True, Death Stranding's base writing is an undeniably self-indulgent mess, but all the repetitive, on-the-nose dialogue in the world cannot distract from this game's downright therapeutic impact and exceptional effectiveness in communicating its central themes of isolation and connection through its singular world and mechanics. It also helps that the game is on so many levels tailored exactly to my emotional and aesthetic sensibilities—hell, this game even knows my specific interests in politics and science. Traversing gorgeous, lonely, desolate landscapes as a central gameplay mechanic? Post-capitalist economy based on solidarity and mutual aid? Particle physics references and metaphors permeating the entire game? CHVRCHES in the end credits? It's almost ridiculous how much this game panders specifically to me. But regardless of my personal biases, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to call this one of the most bold and forward-thinking gameplay experiences the modern AAA space has to offer.

Building connections

It's funny how life works sometimes. I never had the original intention of playing Death Stranding until a friend gave it to me out of nowhere for giving her something for Christmas and yet here I am several weeks later thanking her once again after going for every achievement and over a hundred hours. The reason I bring this up is that it relates to how Death Stranding wants you to experience the benefits of being part of something more than a single entity hoping we don't regret it.

I had a lot of reservations going into this one with how I knew that if the gameplay didn't keep my hands moving and my mind contained throughout the whole experience in that I wouldn't like it but Death Stranding has a surprising amount of depth in how to approach every delivery. The act of just delivering and constantly running around isn't what makes Death Stranding completely unique in this facet but the act of "walking" and "traversal" makes this one of the most engaging experiences for a first time. All of this wrapped in one of the most heavy handed and odd writing style for a Kojima game in my opinion makes this one of the best open world games by a long mile.

It's probably the first time in a while that I felt like it was quite obvious what Kojima wanted to tell with this title. The world is disconnected from everything due to an deathly apocalypse called the Death Stranding. Everyone is out for themselves and too scared to even go outside relying on porters to survive like our protagonist, Sam Bridges. Sam never had a connection to the human society except for one moment and then it being taken away has let him believe that connections are meaningless and only bring pain. One of the best parts of his development was going all over America, meeting new people and helping them bring stuff. There's a personal satisfaction when you've done all you can and their best reward isn't some random item or overpowered item but opening that door for you and letting you in. Doing all this made me feel the change was genuine as I felt the same way too, I ended up helping everyone except one person. I won't say who it is but one of the preppers you meet is really sick and their deliveries consist of bringing medicine to them. I ended up doing this for a while until I almost maxed them out until I decided to do story and hold on delivering packages to them. After a while, I decided to deliver one final package to this person so I can max out our connection and then I wondered why they didn't pick up when I came but saw a BT. After I delivered my package and received an email from them asking where we were and only hoping we were continuing the good fight before sharing the news that they moved on from this world. It's a small thing but it made me sad that I couldn't deliver that one final package for them. To my dismay, I found out you can keep them alive but you had to constantly deliver to them throughout your whole experience but people will probably tend to move on from them from a gameplay standpoint like I did. "Why go back when you already maxed them out?" is what people thought until this happened but it's just surprising that it actually happened. With all that said, the supporting cast are interesting and even with cheesy names like Deadman or Heartman (guess what this guy is all about), they still manage to hit the right spots in the emotional space with the game beginning how it ends in a sense.

I feel like watching Death Stranding's gameplay is deceiving yourself in the sense you only see it in its simplest form. When you watch someone going up the hill carrying something in their hand, you expect not much is happening on the controller or attention span but to someone actually holding the controller, there's a lot going on and this is one of the best strengths of Death Stranding. Open world games tend to have this problem of going from point A to B being some of the most minut interactions in their games with the player running forward or being in a vehicle and driving there but in Death Stranding, the world puts up a fight. It won't make things easy until you work to make them easy. Running up hill requires you to manage stamina and your balance along with any cargo you might have, holding an item in your hand isn't just a button press but requires holding down the trigger button based on your hand. I initially thought it was tedious to constantly hold down the trigger to hold something in your hand but it does make sense. When you're holding an item in real life, it's not a touch but a constant effort of holding and holding down the trigger represents that your arm is in constant effort of holding up the arm which I thought was pretty intuitive. The gameplay loop mostly kept my hands and fingers on the control going through a death torn America trying to get a video game collector an old PSP system. Fortunately that's not all there is to the "traversal" as the game gives you plenty of tools to circumvent the worst the world and the terrain has to offer. Starting out with ladders and climbing hooks and then turning into elaborate structures like ziplines and bridges. You can eventually build a network of structures that make the world a little easier on you and your boots but that's not all. The online experience is what I feel is the definitive experience for Death Stranding as you don't just your world but a shared one. Various signs of life, tools rusted out from use long ago, and networks already set up are here to help you as your tools and structures help them. You are never alone. It starts to feel more like collective doing everything it can to make everything easier which is how it should be. Personal satisfaction when I poured the most effort into making roads for everyone to get through easier and the only form of thanks is "likes" which don't really serve much of a purpose is all you need sometimes. It also helps that the world just provides a variety of challenges to confront to endless ravines, rocky surfaces, to snowy mountains that tax every facet of your health and tools so you'll need to stay connected to make the most of everyone's efforts. There are vehicles in the game and you're probably thinking "well that'll just make everything easy and trivial like every other open world game" but actually using them might make you think otherwise. They're mostly for flat surfaces or roads you already built since the rocks on the ground will immediately stop you on your tracks to frustration even more so with trucks that provide a lot of cargo space for bigger orders but become bordering on wielding outside of anything but roads unless you know how to drive up the terrain properly. All these tools and I'm reminded of Metal Gear Solid V where Venom Snake had every tool and gun in his arsenal to perform stealth and missions however he wanted in an open world environment and now Death Stranding gives you these tools and structures to perform deliveries and missions in any way you wanted in an open world environment as well.

Apart from "traversal", there's two forms of combat in Death Stranding in which you fight the living and fight the dead. Fighting MULEs which are the human combatants will eventually be required of you and you'll hopefully prepared some tools for it. Early on you'll have a Bola gun that only really ties them up for you to incapicatate later until later on when you get non lethal conventional weapons like assault rifles and shotguns. I really think you can approach these camps early on in a stealthy manner and it would work for the most part and feel a bit fun since you don't have much but eventually when you get the bola gun, you can just shoot them at mules that essentially just run towards you anyway so it stops being a challenge. Later on though, MULEs get a huge upgrade in capability that makes them pretty fun to go against for a while in that they're actually trying to kill you with guns. It's pretty jarring that they do this considering actually killing someone is something you don't want to do. BTs initially feel like this horror mechanic in the preferred way is to go past them undetected since you don't really have any single way of fighting them for a bit and I liked this dichotomy of relaxing traversal and having to keep focus on going through a BT infested zone in the world. You do eventually get tools and weapons that let you fight BTs more efficiently that it unfortunately feels like an annoyance more than something you should be scared of at some point. Boss battles rely on these huge creature like monstrosities that take a lot of damage to defeat and will probably run out of ammo if it wasn't for the other players coming from the tar and helping you by throwing blood bags and rocket launchers. I do recommend playing on Hard at least to keep this a bit challenging and not completely mindless as you will still die pretty quick without armor on Hard. Overall I find this aspect of the game adequate but it was never really the focus of the experience but a good way to break up the action.

As I've mentioned before, the multiplayer aspect of Death Stranding is essential to fully enjoying this experience. Apart from being in a shared world where you can see other people's structures and struggles, you can see warnings of danger, deliver their lost cargo for them if it's on the way anyway, help them with weapons or tools if they really need it or donate materials so everyone can use them. There's a lot of ways to help the collective of people you're with and I think it's the best use of asynchronous multiplayer yet. The traversal also doesn't get made easy by this as you have to face the challenge yourself at least once before you get connected in specific areas too.

The sound of metal clanking against the weight of your cargo, small medleys playing during specific moments in the world. The music and sound of Death Stranding reaches a high note in what was used and how it was used. The highlight is the usage of music throughout the game playing these licensed haunting and serene songs from Low Roar and Silent Poets to give a few examples. It really helps to reflect how quiet the world can be in its photographic view of america based on Iceland from what I can tell. Going down a snowy mountain and it becoming a grass hill while this is playing is a zen like experience that's hard to describe when the game puts you into this reflective state of mind. My favorite original piece has to be this and when you hear it makes it one of my favorite experiences I've had in a bit. The whole song feels somber and later on sounds like one of Sufjan Steven's electronica efforts. I do understand why they didn't have a music player for this game considering its use during certain moments but they could've made it a reward for completing the game or a 100% reward at least.

With all that said, I can understand that this game isn't for everyone or a purely perfect game to anyone but I think in terms of how this game carries out itself is extremely rare and something I wish for more in the industry in general. Death Stranding practices what it preaches and then some with some of the most innovative open world gameplay I've played in a long time, themes I can understand due to my personal isolation barring COVID and the fear of connecting with people. I always felt like every link I made with people is something tangible people can eventually cut off and cutting something always hurts. Reaching out might not be so bad after all. Even in the way BTs are, even in death we are always connected and are never gone from this world as long as that connection is there. We are always connected.

Death Stranding is possibly the best video game ever made. It certainly has impressed, exhilarated, and stayed with me more than any other game before or since.

Death Stranding has completely reinvented social interaction in games. Although Death Stranding is a single-player campaign, it necessitates a connection to the internet. It is here that Kojima's purpose begins to take shape; the theme of "we are stronger when connected" bleeds into every aspect of gameplay. As Sam reconnects the chiral network and puts America back online, portions of the map connect to the grid. This means that the player can build structures like generators, rain shelters, player homes, zip lines, bridges, roads, etc using a PCC kit to 3D print structures out in the world. Once another player connects that same area to the grid in their own game, there's a chance that your structure will appear in their world, and vice versa.

You can also collect lost cargo from other people's games and request deliveries from other players. Once, I desperately needed a floating carrier but didn't have the resources. I estimated I'd arrive at the Distro Center West of Lake Knot City in about 30 minutes, so I requested that someone deliver a floating carrier. Lo and behold, it was waiting for me when I arrived! I felt loved at that moment; some stranger had put aside what they were doing and spent 30 minutes of their time bringing me this carrier for no reward or recognition.

Each structure has the name of the player floating above it, and you can "Like" other players' structures if they helped you. I cannot begin to count the number of times other players' structures saved my life. BTs are chasing me - I come upon a shelter. BB is crying, and my exoskeleton is sputtering out - there's a generator. My boots have worn out, and the MULEs are charging at me - but someone has left a motorcycle at the edge of the road for me. A ladder to cross a chasm, a belaying hook to scale a cliff, all left by strangers for strangers.

I felt truly connected to everyone else playing Death Stranding because everything I did had real-world implications. These were real people out there, with real goals and real aspirations. This infinite loop of everyone in the world delivering packages to each other, Liking each other's structures, and positively affirming each other was beautiful. If we all give, no one is left wanting.

You ever heard of A24? It's a film company known for trying to bring experimental and indie films into the mainstream. It's made films like Moonlight, Uncut Gems, The Witch, Midsommar, Good Time, Ex Machina, and one of my personal favorite movies of all time Swiss Army Man. Death Stranding is like an A24 video game.

I've never played a Kojima game before this. I say this because some people will try to strike good reviews of this game up to fanboy mentality. I can't be a fanboy if I hardly know who the guy is, so believe me when I say Hideo Kojima's newest creation took my breath away. It's an experimental piece with a gameplay unlike any other and while some may call it "rage-inducing" or "boring", I call it "integral to the game's message" and "intricately connected to the plot". It's not a gameplay I would want popularized, because I don't think it could work anywhere else. You also need to be sort of a completionist to even better appreciate the game, cuz going out your way to earn 5 stars from every location also provides to Kojima's vision.

Death Stranding is about making connections. Loved ones, friends, even neighbors or acquaintances all connect us to one another and Kojima's trying to celebrate that. Main protagonist Sam Porter Bridges is a man who wants no connections and with good reason (a reason you won't find out until later in the story). A delivery man who travels the world alone, but due to unexpected circumstances Sam is forced to help the organization BRIDGES on their quest to reconnect all of a fragmented shell that was once the USA. You see some doomsday shit happened and now the land of the dead has fused with the land of the living, and now a whole bunch of foolishness such as rain that makes anything it touches age rapidly and invisible ghost creatures is keeping everyone from leaving their homes. Sure, they all have futuristic 3D printers at home to make most of what they want, but they still need food and meds and other things. Now Sam has to not only deliver packages but also install a new version of the internet into every home, allowing for communication to reconnect the nation as one.

This is where the gameplay kicks in. Surprisingly the start of the game may be the hardest point. Sam is alone with nothing but the packages on his back and the BB on his chest, forced to endure through the rough terrain and hazardous weather and ooky spooky ghosties! However as you meet new people they'll grant you with gifts of equipment that make the job all the more easier, and ranking up these locations to 5 star service grants even better equipment. Making connections stronger make you stronger, even more so with Death Stranding's online features.

That's right Death Stranding uses online features, but in a very peculiar way. You will never see another player but their presence in significant. You see, as you're playing the game you will use equipment to help reach high places or cross rivers easily or even heal your cargo from Timefall (that aging rain I told you about earlier). If you leave this stuff behind on your ventures, other players will run into it and use it for their own benefit and vice versa. You're working together heal a broken world, creating rest stations and shortcuts for everyone to share thus creating strong connections with people you don't even know much like the beloved indie game Journey. Now of course you're not receiving everything every single player has left behind, more you're receiving stuff through a filter that gives you just enough to constantly feel like you're not alone on this journey. If you start noticing a particular gamertag coming up few times with very helpful equipment drops, you can even form a Strand Contract with them in which anything they leave behind from this point on will always appear in your game. This is why I feel the gameplay is so integral to what is Death Stranding, and why I think most of those who hate this game probably sped through the story without stopping to take in these brilliant details.

And by the way the story is one of the most emotional journeys I've ever been on in a video game. I don't think a game has ever made me cry. I've definitely been on the verge of tears with games like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and Mass Effect 2 but Death Stranding finally broke me. Sam Bridges starts out as your typical gruff game protagonist. Annoyed grunts and a deep, angry-at-the-world voice. However by Chapter 3 you notice a crack in the persona, and with ever chapter that crack gets bigger and bigger. At first I thought most of the chapters were just character studies. Learning about one character in this chapter, learning about another one the next, and so on. In a way this is true but for Sam each chapter is making a new connection. Sam, and in turn you, are learning what makes characters like Fragile or Deadman tick and thus forming a relationship with them. A man with no connections is finally gaining friends and he's learning to sympathize. To be kind. To be a person.

All of this is brought to life by an amazing cast. You got Norman Reedus, Lea Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, Lindsay Wagner, Emily O'Brien, and Margaret Qualley all bringing in their A-game. I heard complaints of antagonist Higgs being a one-note character and while that is true I think Troy Baker really has fun with the role. The likenesses of directors Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn appear in the game as characters, but due to what I'm guessing is their fear of not being good actors they have voice actors fill in for them.

Not only that but there's so many cameos in this game through the different stations you visit. Junji Ito, Geoff Keighley, Conan O'Brien, goddamn EDGAR WRIGHT, and so much more. All face-scanned and subsequently dubbed by voice actors. Except Conan. He wanted the full cameo treatment voice and all.

I bet you're asking about BB huh? How can you do an entire Death Stranding review and not talk about BB? There's not much to say that hasn't already been said, bucko. I'd die for the little stinker I wish I had gotten the collectors edition so I could carry my very own fetus around and creep out all my roommates! I got the collector's edition for Christmas, and just like I said I'm torturing my roommates and friends. I love my BB.

Now what would I fix about the game? Not much really. I think any story based game that has an upgrade system can always be more fun with a New Game Plus mode. Also even though there are 14 chapters in all, completing Chapter 9 is a point of no return. You won't be able to upgrade any more stations till you finish the story. Wish I knew that going in cuz I had a lot more after-story cleanup than I expected. I feel a New Game Plus would make this cleanup a bit more fun. Also I'd make the Music Player usable out in the field. I get you want us to slowly unlock the music you wanna showcase throughout the game and already having our own music going would mess with that timing and ambience, but dude at least let us use it after the story is finished Hideo. I'm working my ass off delivering these packages at least let me jive to some tunes my guy! I can't even open Spotify because Kojima fuckin blocked the feature which is something I'm beginning to think Japanese games do as a "fuck you" because the last Digimon game I played also blocked Spotify usage.

To sum things up, I didn't really know who Kojima was before Death Stranding and now because of it I'm a loyal fan like so many people already are. experiencing this masterpiece is something that will stick with me forever. It's one of my favorite games of all time, and I doubt anything will ever change that. It's an experience like no other. I think Kojima Productions has a very successful future in store.

EDIT: A24 is working with Kojima to make a live action movie I FUCKIN CALLED IT

it cant be overstated how important kojima is to the game industry. like him or not, he's revolutionized the way we see game design more than once. with his newest game he may not change the way we look at games, but he still proves he knows how to make a new idea work perfectly well.

i went into this game expecting it to suck hard. i thought it would just be walking from point a to b with some face-level story on top. i was severely wrong.

the amount of nuance from just getting package x to point a is insane, with everything down to the terrain keeping your attention. hell will rise from the ground to keep you from delivering some packages. but deliver them you will god damn it, because youre Sam Porter Bridges.

there's so many things that keep gameplay from getting stale, down to the end of the game youre constantly unlocking new weapons and gadgets and modes of transport. on top of that youve got MULE camps which never stop being satisfying and the BT sections which never stop being tense. everything feeds into everything else and its impossible to look away from the screen once it starts, and i have never played anything like it.

but what truly elevates this game is the balls to the wall story. the horrifying symbolism of strands and hands and uterine glands makes for a visual experience unlike anything before it. it's a weird thing to say, but this might be the most well-shot game i've ever played. not to mention that every character is extremely well written and even more interesting than the last, the obvious highlight being Mads Mikkelsen.

death stranding's america is a world i wont forget and the tense package delivery along with it. theres truly nothing like this game and i applaud everyone involved for making such an interesting, dare i say bold game work so god damn well. just one more feather in kojima's cap.

I was thinking, trudging joylessly over wet rocks through glacial streams, my controller making the sounds of a crying baby, that no game has ever made me feel this way before — this sad, of course, but this peculiar mix of weary and curious, of wanting to do something despite the crushing futility of it all. Kojima's bizarrely over-engineered menus and mundane mechanics are so expertly deployed to elicit exactly this paradox, it is no wonder the game is so divisive. The game-ness of the game is turned against you so as to add experiential weight to its surface thematics. And so continuing on this line of thinking no game has done this before (besides Shenmue), made its sadness manifest so physically in the body of the player. I came to realise no film or book or piece of music has either, and so maybe, just maybe this is a big deal. If we are looking to art to make sense of the moment of our own extinction event, then I can think of no better work than Death Stranding to thicken time, to underscore the heavy intensity of the world beyond the human, to remind us that a single rock could be the difference between the end of the world and another tomorrow.