4 days ago
9
I beat the original Death Stranding, but please don’t ask me what happened in it. There was a cataclysm — not quite a Gommage — that made the US more divided than ever, and you play as a babysitter-meets-delivery-guy who has special awareness of invisible, hostile creatures called BTs that are “beached,” which isn’t as relaxing as it sounds. There are grenades filled with pee, poop, and blood, and everyone who’s anyone was motion-captured to be in the game. There are whales, Guillermo del Toro (in appearance but not in voice), huge pools of tar, and Geoff Keighley is there, too.
Sounds like a silly game, right? It is, especially if you skip all of the cutscenes in the game, like I did. And I plan on doing the exact same thing now that the sequel is here.
Death Stranding’s long cutscenes repelled me from playing through it, and I say that as a longtime fan of the Metal Gear Solid games. After five or so failed attempts at getting past the first episode since the game’s 2019 launch on the PS4, due to trying to play it “right” — which I thought required close examination of every word and frame of this bizarrely written story — I just said “screw it.” I finally beat the game on my Steam Deck (runs great!) just a couple months ago.
It’s not that the cutscenes are bad, but their plodding, cinematic pacing feels at odds with the game’s overarching design, which is a glorified physics sandbox stuffed with just as much humor as there is desolation. Plus, the gameplay is so good that I didn’t want to wait for my reward of just getting to run around again and deliver stuff. Anything that helps me more quickly get to the ridiculous mid-to-late-game Sam-versus-Higgs boxing match is worth it.
Death Stranding, even when played as an exposition-light adventure, still holds up because the game is good at doling out meaningful upgrades to how you traverse the fractured land. Aside from missions that require speed (such as pizza delivery) or the utmost care (such as nuke delivery), its design embraces open-ended exploration.
Similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, some early environmental obstacles might prove overwhelming enough to put you on a staid, critical path from time to time, but it rarely forces you to choose one method over another. Put a ladder here, a rope or bridge there, or drift down a mountain on a floating carrier. It’s fun enough just getting to tough-to-reach markings strewn about the world where fellow Porters have… peed. Experimentation breathes levity into a game world that really needs more of it.
GIF: Cameron Faulkner / The Verge
Skipping cutscenes allowed me to fully sink my teeth into a game that I would have otherwise missed out on. And you’d better believe that I’ll be playing Death Stranding 2: On the Beach the same way. Despite the allure of some seriously quirky characters and the potential of this being the last game in the series for a while (perhaps Physint will be next from Kojima Productions), I’m holding fast to my playstyle. I’m most interested to see how the sequel evolves traversal, and the interplay of the environment and player choice. Cutscenes are just another obstacle.
