Hideo Kojima is one of the best-known names in the videogame industry. His work on the Metal Gear series propelled him into the limelight, but after Konami decided it would rather make pachinko machines and shitty zombie survival horrors with the IP instead, he was fired. Prior to his departure, he was working on the Silent Hill revival with the help of Norman Reedus, but that was scrapped in his absence. So Kojima decided to start his own development company and used Norman to create “the first strand type game.” Enter Death Stranding, which has been teased over the last three years with little known about the plot or gameplay up to its release. What we saw were fetal babies in pods being used to spot invisible monsters in a dreary apocalyptic America while Norman Reedus delivered packages. This was Kojima unhinged, free to explore his artistic merits to their full extent and the range of ideas are on full display in this UPS Delivery Man Simulator.
Norman Reddus portrays Sam Bridges as he traverses a desolate America to reconnect civilization. Prior to the start of the game, a cataclysmic event known as the Death Stranding wiped out modern life as the world of the living and the dead now exist in the same reality. Wanting to rebuild the country, initial teams fanned out west to begin construction on shelters and lay the foundation for the Chiral Network. The Chiral Network is essentially Facebook, but instead of people sharing dead memes, your aunt’s questionable political views, subtle brags about the rise and grind of their new entrepreneurial endeavor, or videos of the newest social media trend, it’s supposed to help them find a way to stop the apocalypse from unfolding. The problem is, that network isn’t online, and after the president dies, her replacement is held captive by terrorists on the west coast. Sam must now bring the shelters and cities established in the first expedition onto the network as Fievel goes west to save the presidential replacement and America.
While the Metal Gear series played out as movie-game hybrids, Death Stranding’s story is treated more like an HBO television show. The plot is episodic, and tends to focus on single characters’ interactions with Sam as the mystery of the Death Stranding is unraveled. Beautifully crafted cut scenes play out in cinematic fashion that sometimes made me forget I was even watching a video game and not real people. Kojima’s ability to tell an engaging and interesting story in a world so meticulously designed to explore the ideas around country and the collective human experience are the strongest points of this game. The characters, the setting, and the dialogue for the most part, are all well done in Kojima fashion. He even explained that the Chiral Network only allows you to like things because of all the negativity on the internet, which feeds back into the plot point about maintaining hope in the face of dire circumstances. The world looks beautiful, and the music just fits so well with the introspective tone of the experience. There’s these moments where you’ll be running down a mountainside cliff to deliver a package as your destination sits off in the near distance and a song slowly plays in the background to establish the weight of your journey and the mission at hand. Kojima once again knows how to create a mood and draws you into a unique world, but while the story compels the player to finish, the gameplay has major drawbacks.
First, the point of this game is literally to deliver packages. You need to get from point A to point B while minimizing damage to your cargo and account for the weight you carry. Carry too much weight or don’t distribute the load properly and you can trip over terrain easily, become slower, or lose stamina quickly. As you walk from one destination to the next you use the triggers to shift the weight and maintain your balance while surveying the land for the best route. Even though this game takes place in a massive open world environment, it should not be treated as an open world game like Breath of the Wild or GTA V.
Make no mistake you can go exploring, but the point is to establish routes. How do I get my cargo to my destination and avoid pitfalls? The terrain is supposed to work against you, there’s monster and robber territories threatening to harm you or your packages, and environmental hazards like Timefall, which is rain that destroys your containers and equipment, are all factors you take into account when laying out your path. The first time you make a delivery to a shelter you learn what dangers lie ahead and begin blazing a trail to make the next delivery easier. Then when you bring them onto the Chiral Network you have access to other player’s structures. Another player may leave out a vehicle to use, a sign to warn you of a dangerous area, a postbox to deliver lost cargo, or a private room so you can rest. These can be used to your advantage when optimizing your delivery route and help expand the Chiral Network.
The issue with this type of gameplay is that everything is a hindrance. Walking over these rocky terrains, sometimes you just slip and oh look at that all my packages are gone and I have to pick them all up. Climbing gets wonky as some ledges Sam will jump right over and others you fall and lose all your packages. Wadding through a river you’ll have to stop halfway through to recover your stamina or else you risk getting swept away and then having to retrieve all your packages. Even when using a vehicle, the slightest pebble becomes a massive road block as your truck gets stuck on the terrain forcing you to make a twenty point turn to squeeze by. All of this pushes you to use the technology that makes traversal easier, but that also limits viable playing options and forces you to take the time to set things up properly.
The name of the game for the first half is roads, and the name of the second half is zip-lines. The story would say “okay you need to deliver stuff to this guy over here” so I would take the time to create roads out to the destination or create a zip-line route and all of a sudden no more frustrations, but now instead of a challenge we replace it with tedium. Both roads and zip-lines essentially let you skip all threats, so once you’ve built an effective path that’s pretty much it. Now, just run several deliveries until you max out your relationship with that shelter and move on to the next one. As a minor point, I really enjoy the soundtrack of this game, but in all my play time it is so sparingly used. You can’t play music in the car or while you’re running around, which is a major drag because of how massive the map is you’ll end up driving for five minutes on an open road in silence.
It’s this tedium and small oversights that bring the game down. There are so many menus, but every action has to be taken individually. When you go to a distribution center and want to fabricate equipment or recycle materials, both of those are done separately instead of allowing the player to manage their inventory all at once. These things drag out the game as everything takes too long, in part because every single one of those actions is accompanied by several candid cut scenes. When you recycle equipment there’s a scene of Sam placing it on a conveyor belt, then a scene of them thanking Sam for his contribution, and then another one telling you the new levels of materials available. If you rest in your private quarter you can take a shower, except it’s comprised of four scenes. When you get into a vehicle there’s a little cut scene instead of a short action sequence. This means anytime I’m doing something I’m also having to skip cut scenes over and over again so I don’t have to watch the same ten second animation I’ve seen a hundred times before.
Now, there is combat, albeit shallow. The game divulges into a third-person shooter for some sections as you unload bullets into the enemy until it’s over. This is also how every boss battle goes. These boss battles look cool, but you also can’t really lose them. Sam is a “repatriate,” which basically means when he dies he can just come right back to life and continue the fight until it’s over. “Dying” has a bigger consequence outside of these battles, since if you “die” or get knocked unconscious in a terrorist encampment in the overworld they steal all your packages and you have to go get them back. It all feeds back to the real point of the game, which is you’re a delivery man. Also, sometimes when I had the truck and I went to deliver a package it wouldn’t fully register that I had the cargo in the truck bed so I would have to open the truck menu, get the required delivery, and then walk it into the shelter terminal like I was an actual UPS driver.
Death Stranding is a work of art, and Hideo Kojima continues to push the boundaries of storytelling in videogames, but in his first independent project some restraint may have been necessary. There is an ambitious title here, but the sloppy mistakes in the core gameplay make it difficult for fringe players to enjoy it or even make it replayable after the first time. The sheer amount of ideas at play split the focus of the game, and the disjointed form of storytelling that mirrors that of a broken America must rely on slow, drawn out sections of you imitating the tedium of the working man. While the message, and reflective dive, into what it's like to live in the modern world, dystopian or otherwise, are interesting themes and something I applaud given most large studio’s aversion to exploring anything other than the moral simplicity of a Marvel movie or just providing power fantasies, it is missing the level of refinement we’ve come to expect from Kojima. This is the “first strand-type game,” and in the future if they can find hope in the face of this unknown genre it could unlock the potential Kojima seems to see. UPS Delivery Simulator: The End of Times Edition just missed you. We're sorry for the inconvenience and we'll try again tomorrow.