Hideo Kojima’s ‘Death Stranding’ Is Beautiful, Smart—and Kinda Boring

Death Stranding is the latest game by acclaimed videogame director Hideo Kojima and his studio, Kojima Productions. It’s his first released work since his unceremonious departure from Konami and the Metal Gear Solid franchise. It’s a big, bizarre, and difficult-to-explain exercise. So in lieu of a traditional game review, we put together some thoughts and pointers for you to take along as you begin the game—and to help you decide if you want to.

1. It’s Very Atmospheric

Fog and moss stretch out before me in all directions. Rocks peek up out of the thin layer of green, peppered with impossible fungi and bits of trash. There’s rain on the horizon. There’s always rain on the horizon. The rain is a collapsing effect in action; it is part of a phenomenon, unique to the world of Death Stranding, called timefall. Timefall is rainfall by way of chronological acceleration. In other words, everything the water hits ages. The boxes on my back corrode and start to collapse. When a drop hits my skin, it weathers. In Death Stranding, everything is already dying or dead. The future, whether it’s accelerated or not, always feels like a threat.

2. It Requires a Lot of Balance

Death Stranding, presently exclusive to the PlayStation 4 but coming to PC next summer, is as sprawling as the horizon that stretches before my player character, a man named Sam, played via motion capture by Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead). Sam’s journey is mostly walking—he’s a porter, a deliveryman who has to deliver his packages on foot. By hand. With timefall and worse horrors in the wilderness that used to be America, no other delivery service can function. Every package that needs to be moved between the disparate outposts civilization has left has to be delivered this way. Sam, and by extension the player, spends most of his time walking from place to place. And the journey is long.

A dizzying array of mechanics accompany Sam’s walking. He can grip the straps of his backpack for balance—one input for each side—and each bump, rock, or invisible hole in the path is a threat to that balance that needs to be vigilantly avoided or accounted for. Your cargo—as much as Sam can carry—can be rearranged freely on Sam’s backpack and tied to straps on his shoulders and hips, the better to balance him this way or that. You can also switch cargo to his hands, holding down a button to grip it tight. One of the adjectives that comes to mind to best express the moment-to-moment play of Death Stranding is “fiddly.”

Getting through this journey takes time. I can’t offer you a definitive take on its expanse. Consider these notes from the road.

3. Everything Is Connected—Except People

The apocalypse undergirding the world of Death Stranding is complicated. It’s a game exceptionally concerned with connections—the writing is particularly unsubtle on this point. When the world ended, then, it ended via connection. Boundaries between death and life broke down, as did the border between past, present, and future. Some dead people come back to life, now, while others fade away and turn into wandering spirits that are toxic to the people they encounter, like magnets of opposite polarities that can only push each other away. Except, when these spirits, BTs, encounter people, the result is a good deal more violent. Explosive, even. Many people sense a mysterious connection to the afterlife, dramatized here in a striking image, as a beach full of fish washed up on an inky black shore. Which, of course, is another form of stranding.

Everything is connected in the world of Death Stranding, except people. The horrors of this new, incomprehensible world have led most of civilization to collapse into itself, and isolated communities are all that’s left. Sam is commissioned to take new technology to these isolated settlements in order to connect them to a new, futuristic type of internet, one with a mysterious technological connection to reality’s broken-down cycle of mortality. Via connection—a “strand” of boundless data—Sam’s America can be reconnected.

Again, it’s not subtle.

4. It Requires Endurance

Growing up, my family knew some long-haul truck drivers. It’s brutal, dull work. You can’t maintain a normal life schedule, or a normal suite of connections, if this is your full-time work. One friend of my parents’ would spend several days at a time on the road, commuting across state lines with his cargo, before spending a few days at home. He kept strange hours, only coming home as a waypoint during the busiest times of the year. Sometimes, his schedule was so off that he would sleep somewhere else even when he was home, so as to not disturb his wife and kids in the middle of the night.

Doing work like that requires a high tolerance for boredom. You have to be able to stay awake for hours upon hours of work that requires just enough attention to focus, but not enough to demand interest. Sam’s work in Death Stranding is a lo-fi version of the same series of tasks. Go here, go there, don’t fall asleep. Try not to fall off a cliff. Make sure to stop and rest now and then, or you’ll regret it.

5. It’s Boring

Is boredom a productive emotion for art to produce? In my time with Death Stranding, it’s one of the primary emotions I’ve felt. For lengthy, fascinating stretches, nothing will happen except one leg after another. It is at times excrutiatingly dull.

Boredom is an unusual goal for a work of art to aim for. Boredom compels people to turn off the television, to walk out of the theater. To many perspectives, “It’s boring!” is the most glaring sin a work can produce. Even among critics, we often talk about good art being art that engages us. It provokes us. It demands our attention. Death Stranding seems, so far, at least, largely uninterested in doing most of those things. There are periods of high activity, stretched across the pockets of civilization you find as you walk from coast to coast.

It’s worth noting that, even among people who know truckers, they often have a (likely unfair) stereotype of being slightly unhinged. The assumption is understandable, even if it’s uncharitable. To take on that level of tedium, that sort of boredom, willingly? Maybe something’s wrong with you.

6. Seriously, It’s Just a Lot of Walking

Death Stranding didn’t invent games about walking, of course. Indie titles like Proteus and Dear Esther are about walking as a means of exploring a beautiful environment, or as an interactive focal point to experience a narrative. But Death Stranding seems uniquely interested in the mechanical complexity of traversal across open spaces.

Part of this is simply a difference in scale. Death Stranding has the budget and programming backend to code specific, odd moments that add layers of interaction to simple movement. Drinking water, eating food, stopping to use the restroom. These are all things you can do in Death Stranding, and to get the most out of the game you have to do them. It pulls you into the small, careful maintenances that are always a necessary part of travel.

It’s not surprising. Hideo Kojima, as a creator, has always been interested in bodies. In the Metal Gear games, people are regularly losing limbs, having their body parts replaced by machines or grafts. His heroes in Metal Gear are soldiers, their bodies themselves literal tools of war. In Death Stranding, Sam’s body is an equivalent sort of tool. I spent a lot of time while playing Death Stranding imagining how much Sam’s back must hurt.

7. Oh, and There’s a Baby

Have I mentioned the baby yet? There’s a baby in Death Stranding, BB, a so-called “bridge baby.” It’s kept in artificial gestation and used as a crude means of further bridging the boundary between life and death, allowing people to perceive the usually invisible BTs and avoid them. Sam carries BB in a mechanical womb on his chest. It’s another type of collapsing, of the cisgendered stereotypes that suggest that only women ever gestate children, and also between the boundaries of different stages of existence.

There are, naturally, interactions baked into the game to visit with and soothe the baby. It’s a lonely trip, but you aren’t entirely alone. BB is always with you.

8. The Boredom Helps

Boredom isn’t a wall. It’s a window. Boredom is a way of paying attention. Boredom doesn’t necessarily dull. Sometimes, it heightens. It’s a restlessness in your arms. A tension in your fingers. A working, busy glance around the room looking for something to do. Sometimes, boredom can put us to sleep. But it also has a way of waking people up. Boredom primes you to notice.

9. It’s a Stellar Mixtape

Death Stranding has a star-studded soundtrack. There is music here from bands like CHVRCHES and Low Roar, peppered throughout the game the way celebrities regularly make cameos as in-game characters. It feels, on one hand, like another entry in Hideo Kojima’s ongoing middle-school crush on cinema. Films have recognizable faces and hot mixtapes of original tracks from big names. So, too, does Death Stranding.

But also. Sometimes the songs will start up in the middle of a journey, a cry in the wilderness. These songs light up the open frontier. In these moments, the game feels like a masterful mood piece or some scenic music video. The spaces in Death Stranding are often, so far, functionally empty. Uneventful, save for occasional run-ins with BTs and ever-present minor obstacles to adjust for. But that makes them open canvases for this sort of experience. A great song can make a world of difference.

10. It’s Fascinating

If boredom is a window, here’s what I see. The greenery is vivid against the gray of the sky. Sam wobbles slightly as he walks, and I have to carefully keep him from picking up too much momentum as he stumbles slightly over a small rock. He’s bowled over a bit by the weight on his back, a little over a hundred kilograms.

The rain passes fast. I stop, letting Sam catch his breath. I drink something, and grab the BB’s artificial womb. I tap and shake it, soothing the child. He laughs and presses his face to the glass. I look forward to the horizon. It’s beautiful, and still. I’m bored. I’m fascinated. I keep going.

More Great WIRED Stories

Read More