metal gear post office

Damn it Kojima!

I was all ready to rubbish this game.

I really was.

I was not having a good time with it.

Then what do you do but go all Hail Mary in the last third of it and somehow save the whole thing from a thoroughly average review rating? I probably shouldn't be surprised that you somehow accomplished this feat given your past record but there we are. From the mind of the man who brought us Metal Gear comes the ending that saves the whole thing. Anyway I think I'm getting ahead of myself here. As you may have gathered, I have now played and completed Death Stranding. A game that has provoked many thoughts from myself, thoughts I will now dish out in no particular order.

Warning: possibility of minor spoilers below...

Developed by Kojima Productions and Initially released in 2019 on the PS4 as his first release since his exit from Konami, Death Stranding had a lot of hype to live up to. Some major behind the scenes drama had surfaced around the time Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was released in 2015. Kojima's name was removed last minute from the box cover art, there were rumours of the game going far over budget and as it turned out some game content never got finished leading to some dangling plot threads within the finished game itself. Drama, exciting juicy drama. 

Also we never got that Silent Hills game teased at the end of the rather excellent and much-missed P.T. experience released in 2014. A Silent Hill game with Hideo Kojima behind it would have been something to behold. Yes whoever really 'won' in that battle between him and Konami, I think it's safe to say we all lost a little something there. Anyway Kojima left Konami, re-founded Kojima Productions as an independent entity and several years later we get this, a game that gamifies same-day delivery. A game I was all ready to dismiss at the halfway stage and a game that somehow brought me around by the end. Enough of the broad strokes, let's get into the details. Any comments here specifically apply to the Death Stranding Director's Cut edition for PS5, not that I think it makes much difference from what I've read up on the subject.

You are Sam Porter Bridges as played by Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead fame. He was going to be the lead of that now cancelled Silent Hills game and I assume Kojima was discussing Death Stranding with him relatively soon after going out on his own. Anyhow you are a delivery man, you might in fact be THE delivery man in a Kevin Costner as The Postman kinda way. For you see the world this takes place is mostly an empty one. Full of beautiful mountainous horizons and strangely quiet habitats, snowy peaks and desolate rocky outcrops. It's a green world and a seemingly peaceful one but then you come to find that some bizarre disaster unfolded not too long ago. A disaster that re-ordered out ideas of life, death, time and space. You know, the small things like time and space.

Now not too many people are to be seen above ground and most live under it. You never see them yourself and your only point of contact with these places is via the somewhat monolithic warehouse structures that serve as high tech customer service points for your regular day job of conveying packages between the settlements. Life has been atomised and isolated to the nth degree. This is not helped by the spectral beings who wander the landscape, who are seemingly conduits to some other place. Beings who can summon vast oil lakes full of tar covered ghouls who will try to drag you down should you cross their path. People keep referring to 'The Beach' using the definitive article. Dead bodies have to be disposed of in a very particular way lest they become the kind of problem you don't typically associate with the recently dead. 

What this world needs is someone to connect it all back up, to restore a sense of unity and belonging to a now broken nation. What this world needs is Sam Porter Bridges... apparently. You see he happens to be surprisingly well connected for a humble porter of goods and services. Won't spoil the details here but suffice to say the fate of America and possibly reality is in your hands. You will take an unlikely path to such heroism by conveying packages of varying size and weight back and forth across the desolate but picturesque landscape. It's a fetch quest writ large and it's here where the issues started for me for you see this is about as exciting as it sounds for most of the games playtime. I took a mostly story-centric route with a few side quests here and there and let me tell you the to and fro does got a bit disengaging very quickly.

Quite possibly this is the point that is being made? I'm not sure myself if this is by accident or design but the traversal in this game does make it a laborious and tedious experience at first. You will get the requisite upgrades and vehicles along the way but the landscape is very much an obstacle no matter how you choose to go about your business. There's a bit too much going from A to B and back again in the early game which didn't help either. Is it a statement on monotony and repetition? Does the gig economy suck? Is nature the implacable foe of man? There's a point being made here I think, I'm just not entirely sure if it adds or subtracts from the experience. 

Do you like walking? Do you like changing footwear? Do you like managing cargo for transportation upon your person? How about urination in public? You can do that too. Also you can go to the toilet and take regular showers in this game which helps you stock up your weapon supply and no you did not read that wrong. Also upside down rainbows. Just trust me that it is all related somehow. Also you're immortal I think, they don't say that outright but that seems to be the general effect of the condition your character is blessed/afflicted with and the main reason why he is one of the few people who live and work above ground. 

Apart from incorporating the respawn mechanic into the story, it also seems to tie in with the semi-online multiplayer aspect here. This does more firmly tie in thematically with the game with its ruminations upon connection and disconnection from the larger societal whole. You can form 'bonds' with others in the aquatic 'afterlife' or whatever that was exactly. In the world of the living building structures and helpful aides to navigating the landscape is a large part of the experience and structures built by other players in their games can become available to help in your game as well. Very reminiscent of the multiplayer elements of Dark Souls all said.

As you may be gathering there is a lot to take in over the course of this game. It's weird concept piled upon weird concept with a side dish of odd, bizarre interludes. Characters eat bugs and speak in abbreviations. Take a shot every time someone says 'BT' and you will be dead of alcohol poisoning before reaching the mid-game. Rainfall is plentiful and deadly, causing everything it touches to age in an accelerated way. You carry what appears to be a foetus in a jar that serves as an early warning system for the apparitions that stalk you across the countryside. Some of the better sections of this game see you transported... somewhere else entirely. These are jarring interludes but at least these are sections rich in atmosphere and presentation. 

Basically the game goes for long stretches without caring to fill in too many blanks in your knowledge of what is happening. No bad thing on its own but when coupled with the less than adept pacing it became a real issue for me and I struggled to maintain my interest in playing this game during the first half. At one point I looked up the Eurogamer review of this game and the word 'indulgent' is the one that sticks in the mind after reading it. That review very much errs on the side of this indulgence being a good thing whereas I might wager it is only half successful in the gambits undertaken. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots was probably the prior standard bearer for the indulgence of Hideo Kojima's creative instincts what with its half hour cut-scenes and whatnot. This probably takes the crown from it if I'm honest. Large swathes of Death Stranding felt like I was only playing it because Kojima's name is attached to it and not because I found myself engaging with it in a compelling way.

About two thirds of the way in though something changed. If I had to pinpoint the moment this game shifted from tolerable to good I would say it was during one of the latter sections of the game where you find yourself navigating some beautifully desolate snow covered mountains in a thick whiteout of snowfall. This is perhaps where the obstacles in your path to a successful delivery started to feel more tangible and it feels like a fraught battle against the elements rather than merely an irritating journey from A to B. It also helps that some long overdue joining of the dots takes places in this part of game and at least some of the weirdness is put into context. Slowly I think this game turned me around on it, not a complete 180 but enough so that I could finally appreciate more of the design than was apparent prior to this point. 

Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the various aspects of this world even if you have to dig through a whole bunch of supplementary material to actually get much insight into what exactly happened to it. With popular culture being chock full of apocalypses of various kinds, this is a vision of the end of the world that truly does stick out. It feels a bit abstract and David Lynch at times with that uneasy feeling that humanity is barely even a blip on the radar of whatever caused this great catastrophe to take place. Vaguely Lovecraftian in its cosmic indifference without feeling too much in debt to that whole off-shoot of popular culture.  

The presentation is sublime with some of the best visuals I've seen in modern gaming. The atmosphere conjured by the visuals and sound work really accentuate the experience. When weather systems hit, you really feel it with a pair of headphones on. Music by Low Roar features throughout, its not to my taste and most of the tracks end up sounding a little too samey to my ear but it does the mood-setting no harm. Alongside the Hollywood A-listers you have the participation of at least two major film directors who I assume must be pals with Kojima. Again that word indulgent comes to mind but at least on this front I think it mostly pays off.

What really helped me turn around on this game was its ending. Kojima as a general rule usually nails the home stretch of most games he is involved with. Even the less well received Metal Gears all have a decent last act. In Death Stranding I wasn't expecting all the tangents to come together by the end but most of them do with a twist I won't spoil here. Suffice to say it nails the landing both as a twist but also as an emotional resolution to a certain character's arc. Dancing around spoilers here but one particular Hollywood A-lister does some excellent work here making me give a damn about what happens at the end of this game. Indeed most of the reception to the game seems to be united on the point that the end game is strong here. A few dangling threads are left but I assume these were left for the sequel currently in-development.

So its frustrating, annoying and baffling but also endearing, compelling and ultimately rewarding. It's not an experience straight out of the cookie-cutter but neither will it be to everyone's taste either. I suspect Hideo Kojima is one of those creatives who works best with an editor or with some kind of limits in place to push back against. When given a blank canvas and the freedom to do what he wants the experience is uneven at best and incoherent at worst. Yes I will be playing the sequel, there is enough good stuff here to warrant another go-around with this fascinating world but for myself I hope the follow-up has a little more consistency to the experience. Anyhow that's that, I'm off to find a Youtube video that explains the lore of this game and explain to me no doubt how I've probably misunderstood at least half of it.