Kojima's games are proof that even in the triple A sphere video games can be art. That said, Death Stranding was rough for me, the gameplay was definitely not to my taste,, eventually forcing me to quit after 8 hours of play and watch the rest of the cutscenes on youtube - But I found the sci-fi world and concept as well as the story itself to be pretty good.

Having now actually played two Kojima games (namely MGS1 & 2) I could easily recognize the Kojimaisms. Characters talking like they never communicated with a human being before, really in-depth backstories for the characters, whacky humor, heady sci-fi concepts and of course the occassional fourth-wall break. I kinda liked it better here than in the two MGS games I played, maybe because the whole concepts of the afterlife, beaches and the general more surrealist and slightly horror related imagery making it less realistic (despite the effort of stuff like motion capturing and keeping the likeness of famous actors) and consequently more cohesive as a whole.

I still feel weird about Kojima's never-ending boner about the USA, but here I felt the criticism more clearly than in MGS2 especially in the commentary on Trump's slogan "make america great again" through Bridges' slogan "make america whole again". A lot of characters obviously comment about how america has always been a lie and never a union of free people or anything of the like, but overall the sci-fi concepts of life and death blending into each other and the discussions of beaches as ideologies and personal world views again took a precedent over any material analysis of how the USA is just not a great place to live in especially as as a worker, poc, indigenous or queer person or any mixture of these.

What I'm mostly not in line with however is the gameplay. If I was being reductive and mean about it, I would just call it an endless series of fetch quest, making you track endlessly across an open-world. But it's kinda more than that. The walking mechanic and you having to watch you every step and really think about not loosing your cargo is kinda neat, I guess, but definitely not my cup of tea. For me it felt a bit like the game was resisting to be played, making every track across for the deliveries feel like ardous work (On two play session I actually felt like I had just finished a tough day at work and just lay there trying to recuperate from that alone). I have felt this way before when I played games like Shadow of the Colossus or Ico, though this game's system are definitely better thought out than the aforementioned games. In short: clunky controls wasn't the point here, but just the challenge itself was really grating for me.

All this made me think about video games as an artform and how inaccessible they can be. Like a movie you just need to watch, of course being familiar with tropes, stroytelling and understanding what a cut is supposed signify will help, but you will get around this quickly and if you have watched over 400 movies, you might still find one you can't wrap your head around, but you will still be able to engage with. The same goes for books, of course reading a romance novel has different conventions from reading a high fantasy novel, but it's not as high a wall to climb to get over these differences, if you have read a lot of stories. But with video games? I've played over 400 of these and I couldn't really play Death Stranding properly. The interactivity of video games really is a the strong point of the medium, but it can also be its weakness. You might be really into a concept for the narrative or world, but if you just can't deal with the gameplay, then you're just fucked. (Yeah, I tried playing around with difficulties, I still couldn't enjoy it. And yeah, that makes me sad too, which is why I'm writing this in the first place).

I don't really have a solution for this problem, other than implementing maybe more accessibility features like Celeste did, even if that means that a player could theoretically bypass all of your mechanics if they really wanted to. Maybe someone will come around and have a better idea someday.

P.S.: This is the first time I really liked the cast of a Kojima game. Deadman is a comic relief character for a lot of moments, but he's great. Cliff was really cool and I was actually kinda tocuhed by the backstories of Mama and Heartman. Higgs was also an incredibly entertaining antagonist. Ironically, the only character I found to be a bit bland was...Sam. But well, shit happens.

POV: You have taken mushrooms at a house party and every attempt to play with perspective, shapes and colours is being interrupted by a guy you don’t really know explaining the plot of Inception to you; the door appears to be locked or missing.

This is Superliminal, a game about changing your point of view to overcome problems with out-the-box thinking. You will sometimes have to step so far outside of that box that you will find yourself inside a YouTube walkthrough because you are only permitted to solve each of these puzzles with a single pre-determined solution.

There are some phenomenal visual tricks and spaces here, but ultimately Superliminal has been sandwiched by two 2021 releases at opposite ends of its perception-playing spectrum: Psychonauts 2 uses the same space-within-space and object-outwith-space effects, but doesn’t concern itself with making players understand or break these phenomena into composite pieces to be comprehended - they’re merely decoration in service of psychosis platforming; KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, in another dimension, has its player observe these technical phenomena without any expectation of conventional interaction, understanding that the act of seeing spectacle is more than enough and that illusions should be protected from close examination. Superliminal occupies an awkward middle ground between these two experiences, forcing players into kaleidoscopes that initially feel boundless, but are gradually reduced to traditional video game boxes as the pre-ordained solutions to their problems fail to reveal themselves and we begin to mash the [USE] key on physics objects.

This is, of course, a really fancy way of saying that I got frustrated with a bunch of the puzzles here and ended up pissed off at cool optical illusions and spatial trickery. But shouldn’t a game about lucid dreams within lucid dreams feel more boundless than this? Why do I have to play with unreliable physics objects to get to a far-off ledge when a dreamer would choose to fly there instead?

There was an amusing bit towards the end of the game where I glitched a bouncy castle through the floor and then stepped through a connecting portal into its negative space, spending fifteen minutes wandering around outside the boundaries of the gamespace, admiring the bugged linedefs and surreal wooshing sounds while looking for my next task. “Ah. This is more like it. This is a dream.” was my thought - imagine my disappointment when I found out one of game’s the most exciting moments was a noclip! A game about boundless, limitless dreams where most rooms look like a dentist lobby. Who among us dreams of block switch puzzles?!

There is a fair amount of excitement-and-wonder-by-design here, thankfully, and most of it is concentrated into the final 30 minutes of this linear trip through the unconscious - but even then, you’ll no doubt drop the ball of building momentum at some point when the game suddenly decides that certain walls can be walked through or you can’t get a slice of cheese to stay at the right size (why didn’t they just let us manually grow/shrink objects?). In my end, the epilogue monologue was drowned out by a twinkly-twinkly “you are special” piano piece, which felt like something of an apt summary of the game at large - big ideas, smothered by technical awkwardness. Worth checking out because it’s only two hours long, but like Inception it’s a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that will feel like it went on for much longer. You will be relieved to finally wake up.