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.