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Thematically at least, Death Stranding is at its weakest when it later adds more traditional elements, such as shooting sections and more regular 'combat' encounters, because its strongest theme is loneliness. It comes from the fact that Sam is this lonely outsider figure for the most important parts of your experience. But the game's power doesn't come from that rather pat conclusion. I suppose you could describe Death Stranding's arc as Sam, the outcast, becoming the common strand that ultimately binds various groups together. Half the time you forget that BB's even there: until you start fooling around with the 'soothe' interactions, and now I feel guilty if I see a spectacular view and don't treat BB to some photo mode. You begin the long trek up a mountain knowing with certainty you won't bump into anyone else on the way. The human structures that exist are disparate, brutalist blots on the landscape, nibbled-away at their edges by flora. This world is, to begin with, almost all nature. Thematically at least, Death Stranding is at its weakest when it later adds more traditional elements.” I'd initially forgotten that Sam could shout out to the hills, until a mis-placed 'like' activated it: now, just like when I'm on a walk myself, I every-so-often talk to myself. I plan routes now (I know, I know, I should've been doing this first time).Īnd while I'm walking slowly along, back loaded-up like a forklift truck, I've been thinking about the interactions Kojima Productions put in. I approach deliveries with patience, planning, the right gear, and a bit of knowledge. Thanks to having played it through already, I'm much better at Death Stranding now: one of its nicer elements is that this isn't really a game where the difficulty is skill-based, but more about thinking. There's the CODEC calls but Sam is nearly always-with the exception of BB, which we'll come to-alone in a vast landscape. The world was designed such that Sam almost never sees another human being in the flesh outside of cutscenes: the vast majority of deliveries are made to functional industrial-style bunkers, where you're thanked by a hologram projection and sent on your way with new deliveries. Parts of Death Stranding now land differently. The most obvious point to make is that you play a deliveryman, and we've just gone through a spell where delivery people could be the week's only face-to-face human contact: as Larkin wrote in Aubade, "postmen, like doctors, go from house to house." And so the things that Kojima was noticing about our society, and making core to Death Stranding, have become acutely magnified through this lens. I now live in a world where I don't even notice the plastic screens at supermarket checkouts anymore, nevermind find anything unusual about passing dozens of masked individuals on a town walk, and where my kids sometimes come home from school and I have to jam a cotton bud up their nose.Įveryone has gone through some version of this.
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Let's not overdo things here but, like everyone else, I've gone through two-and-a-half years that have been spent mostly at home, the first year almost entirely. “The world was designed such that Sam almost never sees another human being in the flesh.” (Image credit: Kojima Productions and 505 Games) While the overall tone of things always returns to the triumphal-Kojima never shies from adding in a reference to his own hugely successful oeuvre-it is a book shot-through with feelings of isolation and, in some cases, futile regret.
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The book is full of ghosts, Kojima's father in particular, and how Kojima thinks about certain works is bound-up with his first experiences of it in the context of his own life. When Kojima writes about a given topic, his tendency is to connect it to periods in his life, some of which are described in great detail. While the book is a grab-bag of essays with no real through-line, it does have a theme-loneliness. You're absorbed on some pages, and your eye's flicking to the next paragraph on others. As anyone with an interest in Kojima's work might expect, it is a book that veers between searing insight and tiresome navel-gazing. I recently got around to reading Hideo Kojima's The Creative Gene (opens in new tab), a collection of essays by the designer on a diverse range of pop culture topics: re-issues of animes he liked watching as a kid, reviews of new science fiction novels, retrospectives on great movies.
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