I knew this would happen (not today specifically)
the negative reviews of Death Stranding are always focused on three things: tedium, how easy it is to fall over, and the story is bloated and confusing
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the tedium is the point. It's a charming therapeutic game about taking things easy and enjoying a journey. Enjoy the scenery and the sound design.
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you're not supposed to load yourself past your carrying capacity and then try jumping off a ledge. Sam's a normal guy. Try slowing down and being careful instead of trying to run straight through a river.
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it's Kojima
Death Stranding rules and I'm pumped for a sequel
By the time you are obligated to carry that much for a mission, you have vehicles to bear most of the weight for you. Near the endgame you're literally building paved roads.
yeah I just wish ceramics were easier to find. Usually I had to resort to looting the MULE camps, which might have been the idea? I was also a little upset the road network didn't have an easy way to get to the weather station. Thankfully the director's cut added more roads.
I have gotten all 50 stars but the very endgame shelters, like the geologist, got a little difficult. I just put ziplines everywhere.
vehicles, powered exoskeletons, anti-gravity hovercarts, magic unobtanium boots. All sorts of cool stuff to refine your awesome mail carrier delivery experience.
I spent the first 40 hours playing that game and didn't fall over once. Then again the entire vibe was already a perfect match for me so I didn't even need to be told to take it slow I just did. Made the same route 10 times and enjoyed each time refining my path every journey.
Death Stranding was definitely my GOTY that year. Such an utterly unique, experimental game with unmatched attention to detail.
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Yes
But
Gaben was right when he said "make your store easier than piracy and people will shop there." I never considered playing it before now tbh, but it's literally two clicks away now so I might.
I refuse to use more than one store launcher so it's not free enough unfortunately
The monopolists will be happy to hear that their propaganda is working.
video game distribution and digital storefronts should be a fucking monopoly why do I want a hundred thousand fucking walled gardens especially when I know encouraging it will just lead to shit like what we're seeing now with streaming transitioning back towards more extractive cable package type rent seeking
...because monopolies will always act properly, never abuse their market power once all competitors are dead, and will surely never engage in any extractive rent seeking... right?
tell me more how good it would be to have 28 different power companies
OH WAIT
USPS? More like BREAK IT UP INTO 20000 PACKAGE COMPANIES
yeah you'd have to pay me to get me to use the epic launcher again
yeah but have you considered that no store is easier than piracy if you never learn how to use digital stores in the first place because you've always pirated. i'm routinely kind of suprised when anyone buys something legitimately online because i still have it in my head that you obviously never give your bank details out online because its probably a scam.
I wanted to like Death Stranding and also every other Kojima game.
Death Stranding in almost every detail is top notch. The visual fidelity, the optimization, the game play mechanics (even when they are a bit odd or obtuse) are incredible.
But I absolutely cannot get over how bad his writing is. It's so overindulgent. The man needs editors or something. It's as if he went to one language class and learned what metaphor is and said to himself "I've learned everything I need here" and never bothered to learn about any other literary device . He's even got unique ideas but I wish he'd just pass them to a better writer. I wouldn't even mind the long ass cutscenes, if what he were trying to convey made any lick of sense.
Every one of his games I sit through a 30 minute scene, and go "well that was stupid, lets see if the gameplay can carry this." Play 15 minutes of some of the most unique and cutting edge gameplay, then when the next asinine 30 minute cutscene starts I decide I'm done.
I used to hate kojima cutscenes for years then something inside of me snapped and now I can watch them on loop. The long ladder bit in MGS3 changed my brain chemistry.
I didn't finish this game, but making the obvious Hillary Clinton stand-in an icon for America and also your mom gave me some pause lol. Like Hideo Kojima grew super de-radicalized after MGS2
Okay but Hillary Clinton is secretly some kind of existential hate demon and you save the world by permanently locking her outside of reality. She also lies to and manipulates everyone and is strongly implied to have intentionally caused the end of the world in the first place.
"Amelie" has like five different layers of meaning including I think a Japanese pun, but one of them is "I am a lie". America's name is "I am a lie".
I mean come on.
But I absolutely cannot get over how bad his writing is. It’s so overindulgent. The man needs editors or something. It’s as if he went to one language class and learned what metaphor is and said to himself “I’ve learned everything I need here” and never bothered to learn about any other literary device . He’s even got unique ideas but I wish he’d just pass them to a better writer. I wouldn’t even mind the long ass cutscenes, if what he were trying to convey made any lick of sense.
What you are describing is almost fully 50% of the appeal of Kojima's games, with the other 50% being innovative gameplay.
The who Metal Gear Solid series famously made no goddamn sense to anyone until years later when we realized the entire thing was a prophetic look in to the near future that we weren't wise enough to recognize at the time.
I'm sorry, but this is exactly why I love Hideo Kojima. Sometimes he'll uncannily predict the rough shape of the future Internet and the culture it creates around itself with chilling accuracy, and sometimes you'll have a dude named Die-Hardman because his real name is President John McClane.
It's that incredibly bizarre blend of sleek, military-accurate designs and presentation, with the SWAT clearing and codenames and all, and the weird philosophical high-concept themes he builds stories on, and the just fucking weird Hideo Kojima indulgences that are thrown in there because it's a fucking Hideo Kojima game, that makes his shit special. MGS2 wouldn't have the same vibe if Iriquois Plissken didn't make sure to clarify that he's called Vamp because he's bisexual, not because he's an immortal blood drinker who can dodge bullets and walk on special zero-buoyancy water.
Is it worth playing? I've heard very mixed reviews of it.
So just like when I worked at Amazon and was suffering from extreme sleep deprivation.
for real the game is really good. Genuinely relaxing and charming. Delivering packages on foot, building roads, exploring a huge map. You can climb any mountain you see. Also has a positive outlook of humanity. I like optimistic scifi, there's not enough of it.
it is but in this game the package fulfillment guy is a national hero and gets treated with the respect he deserves .
He cries a little bit after connecting you to the internet, as they tend to do.
It's still better than 95% of games. I thought it was great. Cool story and gameplay, graphics, etc.
Will give it a go then. Just upgraded my PC and I haven't been able to decide what to play.
It's extremely pretty. The vaguely surreal combination of Icelandic beaches and Lunar moonscapes, the constant soft rains, the deliberate pacing and moment to moment presentness of navigating up a steep hillside or defile. There's nothing like it. It's what you want hiking to be like in an ideal world without chafing backpack straps and blisters.
Story is typical Kojima - lots of characters talking about bizarre concepts in completely neutral tones.
Gameplay is more fun than it sounds. Delivery is explicitly depicted in the game as stirring Dopamine output. It's time-consuming enough to feel rewarding, without becoming a chore, and it's generally optional.
You can always step into a camp of raiders if you're looking for some action or need to farm some resources. The boss levels are very heart-pumping.
Combat is basic but fun, and includes stealth missions and take-downs which Kojima is known for doing well.
It feels a bit slow at first, but you're unlocking new weapons/tools/construction options/vehicles throughout the entire game so there's always something new to play with.
The soundtrack absolutely slaps, too.
I do recommend listening to podcasts or Parenti lectures while playing, though.
Combat is basic but fun
Combat can get creative, like a lot of Kojima games. You can throw cargo boxes at a guy's head, you can trick them into falling off ledges with smoke grenades. You can even do really wacky stuff like run them over while riding the hover platform. The decoy cargo full of sleep gas was always my favorite thing to throw them off. You also get a bunch of different grenades and traps.
Problem is none of that is as efficient as just shooting a gun or punching them, unfortunately
Combat can get creative, like a lot of Kojima games.
Indeed, but like you said, basic brute-force assault is generally most effective. You also have the risk of Voidout if you kill someone.
I still had a great time with DS. I wouldn't pay full Triple-A new release price for it, but it's worthwhile if you can get it cheap or free.
The soundtrack is an experience all by itself. Sometimes I'd just sit down on a mountainside in the rain to listen to the music.
Do you like walking in video games?
Do you like prepping loadouts?
Most importantly, do you like walking in video games
Death Stranding has fast travel. But you can also grind for roads and then truck around like this is a big wheeler sim
The roads are part of the game's vaguely souls-like multiplayer, where you never actually see other players but you encounter some of the structures they've built to make travelling through the world easier. You can contribute resources to build their structures and they can contribute to your structures. The roads deliberately require an unreasonable number of resources for any one person because you contribute to them alongside other players to build them which reinforces the games dual themes of social isolation and the need for community and cooperation.
It's free, try it and decide if you're into it. There's a lot of cutscenes so give it a couple hours. And it's not like the cutscenes ever let up, if that's a downside for you consider it a no then. Reminded me of mgs4 honestly with how the plot and cutscenes went. The moment to moment gameplay is mostly hiking, a little bit of planning before a trek, and some real "oh shit oh shit there's ghosts/MULEs here oh fuck I didn't prep for this" tossed in. There's a spooky haunted woods section that was really fun in the beginning. There's a sense of progression from getting upgrades and advancing west. The combat is baby-easy, you don't want to kill people in-game for diagetic reasons but also because the combat is unrewarding. The game's themes are very appealing, I found. I thought the space they were exploring was intriguing and it'd be nice if more big budget games played around there instead of "I AM A GUY IN ARMOR KILLING EVERYTHING AROUND ME" - the idea of isolated people coming together is neat. I didn't find the characters all that deep or interesting, the lore was cool, the actual story is a little bizarro (it's untethered unedited Kojima so of course).
If you don't want epic launcher and have access to a console your local library might have a copy you can borrow (for free), that's how I played through.
I use the Epic launcher exclusively for downloading free games that I don't want to bother pirating.
Hands down, unquestionably, one of the most satisfying gameplay experiences in my long, long gaming life. Also one of the most emotionally moving and heartwrenching media experiences I've had. I cried a couple of times. And the whole thing is just so incredibly creative and bizarre. In a world where every possible story has been trodden in to the dirt over and over again Death Stranding was new and weird and beautiful.
I love adding titles to the list of free epic games I own but never play
If I ever escape from vampire survivorslike addiction I want to play this
I've been playing this on xbox games pass, but i only have a free month of it so i'm glad its free
however, what in the absolute fuck is going on in this game? does the story ever make sense? i'm really not sure i want to even bother
I am going to deliver mail to isolated American hyper individualistic survivalists until they realize the benefits of mutual aid and community and agree to join our cybernetic post-scarcity society where the only scarce resources left are logistical distribution and personal, emotionally resonant connections with your fellow people.
I totally dig this, but when it came out the trailers made it feel more like "fascism is bad and the only way to get rid of it is by loving your neighbor" and that probably poisoned me. it felt a little to "power of friendship"
Thank you, I haven't played it before but it sounds like a nice :blob-no-thoughts: game and I'm too tired to play a complicated game this weekend.
I like a lot about this game, I was vibing crossing rivers and shit, but the combat and the gun parts just suck, the BTs also suck. The best part is attaching a carrier to your waist and braving the mountain
Death Stranding is not only one of the best narratives in any game, its also the most pro-communist!
I don't have a rig that can play the game (but its been added to my growing collection of free online download games anyways) but I did watch a YT video talking about the game and now I kinda want to play it some day.
