Played from release sporadically until COVID.
What I most admire about Death Stranding is that it delivered a genuinely new game mechanic. Obviously, the delivery man gameplay loop was the point of much ridicule, but I grok'd Kojima's vision pretty quickly and enjoyed the systems designed to exploit the player's altruism and honor into maintaining a tight delivery schedule and infrastructure. It works as a competitive leaderboard type lure as well as an atmospheric, casual game to unwind to. That being said, once you progress enough into the game to regularly encounter enemies that require lethal means, the gameplay loop devolves into a more standard open world shooter and becomes much less interesting and more tedious.
The story has Kojima's usual weirdness, but aside from the horror aspect I found it sparse in detail enough to mostly ignore. (If you like it, you like it, but it's not particularly deep sci-fi.) I thought it was interesting that concepts like transhumanism and the Singularity had seeped into the lore, suggesting that these buzzwords are now rather prevalent (had also been encountering more usage in the wild for the previous year or two).
I think I got within a few hours of the climax. COVID amongst other things took me off track, but I don't feel a particular draw back to it. Shelved, for now.
What I most admire about Death Stranding is that it delivered a genuinely new game mechanic. Obviously, the delivery man gameplay loop was the point of much ridicule, but I grok'd Kojima's vision pretty quickly and enjoyed the systems designed to exploit the player's altruism and honor into maintaining a tight delivery schedule and infrastructure. It works as a competitive leaderboard type lure as well as an atmospheric, casual game to unwind to. That being said, once you progress enough into the game to regularly encounter enemies that require lethal means, the gameplay loop devolves into a more standard open world shooter and becomes much less interesting and more tedious.
The story has Kojima's usual weirdness, but aside from the horror aspect I found it sparse in detail enough to mostly ignore. (If you like it, you like it, but it's not particularly deep sci-fi.) I thought it was interesting that concepts like transhumanism and the Singularity had seeped into the lore, suggesting that these buzzwords are now rather prevalent (had also been encountering more usage in the wild for the previous year or two).
I think I got within a few hours of the climax. COVID amongst other things took me off track, but I don't feel a particular draw back to it. Shelved, for now.