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Patreon Letter: 16th December 2019
🕑 Added 2019-12-17 04:46:24 +0000 UTCHey folks,
Jackson here with the long awaited and extremely underwhelming Death Stranding letter. Long awaited because I’ve had some form of notes on this game on the hard drive for over a month, and underwhelming because I haven’t really been able to cohere them into a strong piece. And ultimately, I’ll get the reason for that out the way up top and it is possibly the most damning thing that I personally can say about a Hideo Kojima Game: I just don’t care.
I don’t care because while the game has plenty of interesting ideas, good and bad, plenty of threads which you can tug on and unfurl all these morsels of critical analysis, after sixty hours of video game the conclusions that it reaches are so trite and empty that it feels like a slap in the face. I walked away from the game tired and unsatisfied, despite the fact that I had enjoyed almost all of my time with it where a character wasn’t speaking.
This, combined with the fact that this winter has been a fucking disaster, both for regular mental health reasons and also because of awful things happening in the world (the UK election, had my healthcare completely rejected because of budget cuts, it’s a bad time), has meant it’s been hard to really bring all my Death Stranding thoughts into a complete piece with a thesis and an argument that will do it justice. And now it’s been over a month, the conversation has mostly moved on, and it is clear that Death Stranding is not a game that has landed with anything in the same hemisphere as the cultural impact of a Metal Gear. It is not a game that needs to be taken down a peg, nor is it a game that needs to be evangelised. It simply is, and now that the ups and downs of my initial playthrough have long subsided, I have no strong feelings on it one way or the other.
With all that in mind, I present to you: my bullet point feelings on Death Stranding, because I still want to get something up on the game! But I would be remiss not to lead with the fact that the true tragedy here has been this ultimate apathy about the entire experience. If there is one thing that I have never felt about a Kojima game until now, it is apathetic. MGS2 and 3 are games that left me exhilarated, MGS4 and V left me often furious and betrayed, but whether it fell on the positive or negative side, I’ve always been deeply invested.
So here’s a few hundred words on my general, very spoiler filled takes on Death Stranding.
SPOILER WARNING FOR DEATH STRANDING BELOW (ALSO EVANGELION)
- Now that I’ve spent the whole intro ragging on how bad the game is, I gotta start out by immediately wrongfooting you and saying that the game’s hiking based gameplay loop is something legitimately special. It is Death Stranding’s strongest weapon. Death Stranding is a game designed to solve a problem that can be phrased as glibly as you want it to: how do you make a video game out of modern video games? To phrase that without being an asshole: so much of the current mode of AAA game design is dominated by checklists and points of interests. Outside of tightly composed main missions, an open world must have sidequests and regardless of the game, to do those sidequests you will be travelling to a location and doing some “core gameplay,” usually combat. Death Stranding asks the question: how can we turn the very act of travelling between arbitrary locations on a large map into “core gameplay?”
The answer it finds is twofold, to make movement clumsy, slow and deliberate, and then to make resource management a constant strategic concern. This starts off simple and familiar enough for Kojima, there is a stamina meter which governs your general effectiveness and you must find enough water to keep your stamina up. But it quickly balloons in complexity as the resource management becomes less about managing arbitrary meters as you might expect, but instead by applying the physicality of the world to the player, and to every item that they carry. Death Stranding is a game about delivering packages, and those packages have to be carried by a human being. Your journey requires you to traverse rough terrain, so you can bring ladders, boots and ropes with you. But those ladders, boots and ropes all have to be carried by you… the same you that is carrying the packages. And here we start to see the game design emerge before our eyes. It is simple, it is logical, and it is compelling.
Delivering packages across the environment, slowly working your way through the massive spaces that make up the game’s vision of “what if America looked like Valhalla Rising” is genuinely great. Managing your body weight as you seek to find the most efficient path without falling flat on your face, finding the right position for a ladder or a rope and successfully navigating some particularly difficult terrain, it’s good. And more importantly, it’s good when it goes wrong: taking a whole bunch of cargo and cutting through a shorter path as part of a calculated risk and then finding yourself stuck halfway up a mountain with your shoes wearing out and your stamina almost zero is legitimately tense. The feeling of working yourself out of a hole and getting to your delivery point with your cargo intact in these situations owns! This is where the game is at its best, and this is the stuff I truly love about Death Stranding. It is also, thankfully, what you spend the bulk of your time doing. But it is not everything. Which brings us to: - In addition to the hiking gameplay set in a massive open world, Death Stranding has both stealth, melee combat and gunplay, despite being made on a much lower budget than the MGSV, which to be fair cost such a ludicrous amount of money to make that Konami fired him before he even finished it. So obviously it is not a game that has the time to create as detailed a stealth and combat sandbox as had come before, yet it still insists on including all those elements. And so these elements, to put it charitably, feel a little half baked.
The thing you will be doing the most besides hiking, is sneaking past BTs. I will get into the story elements later, but for the purposes of gameplay: BTs are invisible ghosts that can kill you if you touch them, and you sneak past not by sight but by paying attention to the spinning device on your shoulder – called an odradek – which points in the direction of the closest BT and spins faster the closer you are. Eventually you get some tools to make fighting them manageable, grenades and special blood bullets that can damage them, but especially early on a large portion of your time will be spent slowly crouch walking past ghosts that you can’t see. The hiking portion of the game is extremely slow paced, yet carefully balanced around efficiency and risk-reward. When it comes to BTs, the punishment for being seen is so high (you get caught in slow tar and have to struggle to escape, or you dragged into the tar, triggering a boss fight), that the best choice is always achingly slow crouchwalking around invisible ghosts. What makes them bad isn’t the slowness itself, but the static nature of them, sneaking past BTs is always the same, and it becomes boring very fast. They often stay in static locations while doing sidequests so I would just mentally mark certain delivery points as no go zones if they had BTs nearby. I kept waiting for the game to introduce a dynamic weather system that made BT locations not just impermanent but predictable, such that planning your route around the rain such that you navigate the eye of the storm and just miss the BTs and it kinda does, but the dynamic rain ends up being not much of an important factor and definitely not a replacement for the static systems.
This is because most BT encounters are crafted for a specific story moment, and then they just kinda stick around in the world. There is a tension running through the heart of Death Stranding where it wants to be a scripted game with a big story and setpieces about walking across the united states, but it also wants to be a sandbox within which you can complete deliveries to your hearts content. If you treat it as the former, you will have gear that sucks and won’t be able to take advantage of the most interesting traversal elements of the game. If you treat it as the latter, you’ll be able to leave equipment, bridges and paths in your most-travelled routes and get the satisfaction of building up your delivery network, but you’ll be running into the same boring stealth roadblocks over and over again, with absolutely no variation or interest. The game is probably 40 hours long if you really book it. 80+ with all the side content. On this kind of timescale, these rough edges really start to cut away at the enjoyment of what is actually good here.
Anyway briefly because I’ve talked about rote mechanics for too long, that’s all specific to the BT encounters but it applies in more general terms to the human stealth and combat is as well. Melee combat is simplistic and easy, and gunplay just feels pea-shootery and bad? Again, hard to follow up to MGSV without the budget to nail down the fine details (they made a whole engine so that game could feel as good as it did), but it begs the question: why not reign in the scope a little? - So that’s my quick Gamer Review of Death Stranding there. Talked about the mechanics, how they work, and whether they were good. The answer: sometimes. Cleared that all up for everybody, sorry it took me over a month. With that out of the way, it is time, at this juncture, to dive into what I would call “the real shit,” which is the game’s thematic ambitions. Apologies in advance if this section gets a little unfocused and ramshackle in its construction, it is merely honest to the source material.
Death Stranding is a deeply contradictory game, at least if you are paying close attention and trying to cohere its various ideas into a singular philosophy. It does reveal one at the end, and it’s a powerfully underwhelming answer for all the questions that the game has been raising to the point where I just felt like I’d had my time wasted. But throughout its extremely long runtime, it is hard to get a handle on what Death Stranding actually thinks about the things that it is about. Just as one obvious example: it is deeply earnest about the idea of connecting everyone together as the most important thing for society, yet the Chiral Network, the fake internet with which you are connecting everyone together is obviously evil. So what the hell man? What’s goin’ on with that dude?
Instead of taking a broad view at all the various themes I want to instead drill specifically into the most confusing and ultimately repugnant element of Death Stranding: its view of America. Within the first ninety minutes of the game, the president (she’s your mom) dies, and you partake in an operation to burn her body and cover up her death. When you return, you are told that someone new has been found who can be the President, and it’s your sister (her name’s also America. Don’t worry about that). Your sister then implores you to connect everyone to the Chiral network, by literally heading west and taming the land such that American infrastructure can function again. The game opens with the president as a hereditary monarchy, obscured entirely from the public, and ordering you to do a literal westward expansion. So I’m obviously like well THIS is all on purpose. And yet, despite this loaded and rich opening, Death Stranding reveals as you play it for 80 hours and the other shoe never drops that it is unaware of the horrifically colonial nature of its own design. You “make America whole again” by laying down bridges and highways, you see the paths and equipment of other players, and you tame the land in westward expansion together, nature as an obstacle in the way of efficient infrastructure and the manifest destiny of the American people.
That is not to say that the game never problematises its own premise, because it certainly is suspicious of the state, but it’s always in a completely bullshit reactionary way. So instead of doing westward expansion 2 and confronting the player with the reality that this is a re-enactment of a real genocide, instead of even the shitty baby version of that where as you connect people to the network you are at the same time displacing pre-existing communities, you get libertarian isolationist preppers who “don’t trust the dang government!” The reason to fear the state is because a state is a form of collective control, a sacrifice of freedoms so we can all live in a society. Death Stranding’s understanding of America doesn’t go deeper than this, a wishy-washy who can say if it’s good position masquerading as nuance, never engaging in the structural critique that made Metal Gear a series that people care about.
This refusal to engage with the reality of how power truly operates, despite having pretensions of being a grand epic about that very idea, permeates every part of Death Stranding and is its complete and total undoing. Famously there is a faction in the game called MULEs, who are Kojima’s attempt on commenting on automation. In the world of Death Stranding, before the big apocalypse, when full automation happened it broke a portion of service worker’s minds because they were so addicted to getting Likes for their deliveries that they started stealing packages and doing deliveries to nowhere to just get a fix of those likes.
MULEs are one tiny part of the worldbuilding but they are so fucking terrible that I have to pause here to talk about them, because they illustrate more than anything else how completely hollow this game’s aspirations of societal critique are. The concept of them is that self-driving cars are introduced and then uber drivers are so brain broken at being made useless by technology that they start stealing cars and then driving them in circles and giving themselves five-star reviews because they crave that validation. This is so completely disconnected from anything resembling reality that it immediately disqualifies Kojima as a storyteller who is able to comment on technology, I don’t care how prescient MGS2 was. Nothing about how automation is meaningless as a concept unless viewed through the context of the allocation of resources, nothing about how the hollow validation of gamified employment is a cog in a whole machine of exploitation, and nothing about how private and state interests intertwined to make the real-world situation that the game is commenting on. Automation simply “happened” in Death Stranding’s world, because technology got there, and people were so terrified of being surpassed by technology that they forcefully inserted the human element back in. The game genuinely presumes that it is the arrogance of the service worker that decries the machines “taking our jobs!” And once again it is sympathetic to that, but in an entirely reactionary way that never critiques the real problem which is not the high concept sci-fi tension between robots and humans being addicted to facebook, but (obviously) capitalism. In a society without a strong centralised welfare system wage labour is the only way to survive, and automation as it stands in the world we live in is a way of cutting human beings out of the profit margins, who gives a shit if that means they die in poverty. No, they merely be on that phone.
Okay that went on forever but you get the picture, the game likes to present its ideas as binaries that gesture at nuance but upon closer examination are really stupid. Your smartphone is what connects you to the world (good), but also it’s literally a handcuff (bad)!!! You get the idea. Which brings us to the final bullet point: how on earth does Death Stranding manage to cohere this into a thesis statement in the actual plot and ending? - The answer is: poorly, and in the most uninteresting manner possible. As the game goes on the idea of rebuilding America and the debates around what that could look like and whether it’s good start to fade into the background as the plot takes on a more existential bent. The big twist is that Samantha America Strand (your sister) doesn’t exist, she and your mother are actually one person (don’t worry about it), and also something called the Extinction Entity. Her role is to merge the Beaches (don’t worry about it) of mankind together, bringing everyone’s souls into one and passing humanity into the afterlife.
It is here that I must boast to you all that I saw this coming. The second they introduced the Chrial Network and the importance of Bringing People Together that my anime senses started tingling and I knew in my heart of hearts that we would not be making it out of this game without everyone’s souls being merged into one. This is a go to plot of a lot of JRPGs and anime but I do not want to spoil too many so I’ll stick to one specifically: it’s Evangelion. Your mother/sister is sentient third impact.
Here, at the end, the game’s insistence on these completely empty binaries starts to come into stark focus. The moral question of the game is for you to stand here at the end of the world and ask yourself, is it worth building society again? After all, society is bad in many ways, but also it is good in many other ways. We really do be living in it. You are presented with a choice: kill your mother/sister/third impact and save humanity, but with an act of violence you are claiming to stand against, or do nothing, and accept that our time has come and we’d just be repeating the same mistakes. And at this moment I must stress: there is an afterlife in Death Stranding so this isn’t obliterating the existence of people. We’d all just… go to the world of the dead. Life on earth that remains is hell and chaos, and the game acts like this is a genuine choice. Its attempts at societal critique throughout may have been disappointing but at the final moments it appeared to be giving me the agency to say “no, rebuilding America is stupid, the arrogant final gasps of a violent, evil nation, and the correct thing to do is move on to the next world and accept it is our time.” And I can forgive a lot for that.
If that had been the end of it I’d say Death Stranding was alright, all told, but unfortunately there’s a third way and the third way: that’s right baby it’s fucking love!! You give your sister a hug and you decide no… we won’t give up on humanity… we will live on! It’s just the most trite ending imaginable. Maybe America is bad, but with love we can build a better world than we had before. How will we get there? Please don’t ask such questions.
This problem is not new for Kojima, you will recognise it as the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4 where a child suddenly works out how to separate “the programs that run society” from “the programs that are the evil AIs that rule the world,” and hooray we can build a better world together, with love, again do not ask how. It sucked then as it sucks now, and in Revengeance that same child was working at fucking Raytheon so she was clearly full of shit anyway.
And ultimately, it’s such a disappointing slap in the face that after claiming to be trapped by Metal Gear for so long, the thing that Kojima gives us is a game about all of the same ideas that were tackled more thoughtfully before, with a bad rewriting of the stock Evangelion plot as the grand revelation to the tale. Like I didn’t mention this but Mads Mikkelsen (who is great, true highlight of the game) plays a heroic soldier whose soul is so powerful it creates an endless battlefield in the afterlife, literally outside of heaven, where the souls of soldiers can fight eternal battle without being used by their nations. You can’t spend decades complaining about being forced to make Metal Gear and then just do that.
It’s a big shame. I hope Kojima can make something I like again because if you remember way back at the beginning of this letter, I talked at length about how good the bulk of the gameplay is. But the density of intolerable cutscenes as you progress and the slap in the face that is the ultimate plot really wore the enjoyment I started out with away. The man has directed some fantastic games, but the last good one was in 2010 and the last fantastic one was in 2004. The increased budgets, the access to immense technological support and Hollywood actors, none of this has made his work any better.
Okay. My word. That was the length of four regular letters, so I while I know that I’ve taken forever to get this one to the people, I did at least fulfil my promise of bringing the content to make up for it. Sorry it’s in such a sprawling bullet point format but if you want me to write something more structured about Death Stranding then I am afraid you will need to get someone to give me a book deal to write about Kojima Games. I’ll do it, and I’ll do a great job, but I Imagine Kojima Fans will not be happy about what I have to say, even though I love the majority of his games.
A few more things before I finish, just some final thoughts in a normal bullet point list rather than full on multi-paragraph sections. Just notes on things that I did not have time to talk about and will not be expanding on in the future (again unless someone wants to pay me lots of money to) but am gonna briefly mention here so you know that I know.
- Gender!!!! All the women in this game are fucking awful because Kojima once again cannot write women to save his life. I almost respect his refusal to listen to criticism because after everyone yelled at him for quiet, he included not one but two water-based torture backstories, one of them with Lea Seydoux in her underwear. Technically it’s an improvement from MGSV but that’s only because it’s actually impossible to make anything as bad as the Strangelove scene.
- Babies! So this is the thing I’m most interested in that I didn’t get to but it’s because the game doesn’t do as much with it than I expected. Kojima’s games are deeply concerned with men and their relationship to reproduction, Solid Snake is a clone, Big Boss can’t have kids because of radiation, immunity to vocal chord parasites renders you infertile, it is a running theme in his works. And the way it expresses here is mostly in a male yearning for a physical connection to their children. Soothing the BB in the fake womb, hearing it gurgle out of the controller, Sam eventually naming it Lou as he talks to it on journeys. It functions as essentially a form of womb envy, the stance of Death Stranding is that there is no greater bond between parent and child than to be connected symbiotically as one organic system. And on top of this it piles a bunch of lore about the need for stillmothers to “sync” with the BBs every 24 hours, nature is fighting against this relationship at every turn, and the game despite treating women like shit is in awe of women because of this special function (and it is a “function,” I use that word as a criticism not a description) they have to nurture children, every scene with Mama is all this. Basically, what I’m saying here is I’m impressed Kojima made an mpreg game about a specifically male desire to bear children and everything he did with that idea made the game more terfy. Genius stuff.
- After the ending I mentioned there’s like two more hours of video game. The cutscenes go on forever in the back half it is legitimately unbearable. They are almost all bad. The game has so many plots and characters, backstories and concepts but I talked about the meat of what matters in the main section. Death Stranding mistakes actual real life density of sheer amount of stuff for thematic density and nuance. The only subplot that people might be yelling at me for ignoring is the mystery of Cliff Unger (he’s your dad, you probably figured this out in like hour six), and how at the end after deciding to live on Sam runs away from America to live alone (because its bad to destroy the state, but it is good to exist outside it in rugged individualism). It’s so funny how both of those plots are remixes of MGS but viewed through the least charitable political read of those games.
- Princess Beach.
- Last point I promise: this has all been hot air. This is my critique of the game but it’s not why the game has failed to truly catch on. I’m sure the average gamer does not care about the colonial hypocrisies of the premise. I firmly believe it hasn’t culturally landed is because Sam has no personality and neither does anyone else in the game. They have character traits and quirks but they deliver their lines in such a dry and earnest matter that irreverent personality, the glue which held the earlier metal gear games together is just not there. It was gone in MGSV too but that game had decades of franchise momentum so people were already invested. Here, Death Stranding gives you nothing to hold onto. Sam has a grand total of one legitimately moment where he expresses genuine personality and humanity outside of gruffly stating his role in the plot in all 60 odd hours, and it serves mostly as a tragic reminder that Kojima games used to be fun! Solid Snake was a good protagonist! Here’s the scene. If the whole game was like this, people would still be tweeting about it. As it stands, I feel like it’s already being forgotten.
Wow my word. That’s the longest letter I’ll ever write. Sorry, I cannot help it, I get like this with Kojima games even ones I don’t like and am grumpy I spent so much time with! It’s my curse. Consider my letter debt repaid, I’ll see you in two weeks with hopefully something simple like a movie.
-Jackson.
