If you want more: Games about traveling across the United States, stealth action, intense storytelling, real-time item and resource management, daddy sims (no, not like that, my goodness)
Notable Differences: A sometimes incomprehensible plot, longer periods of silence and travel, open-world structure, less emphasis on gunplay
Availability: Windows (Steam Deck OK), PS4, PS5
If you just finished Joel and Ellie’s road trip across the United States and are in the mood to head west again, death stranding has another Let’s Save the World trip for you. But this time you better be in the mood to walk. And instead of delivering a girl who may or may not offer a chance for a cure, you deliver pizzas, old game consoles, frozen eggs and sperm, “heavy-duty underwear,” medicines, a string of USB sticks will all reconnect the internet and more more.
There is no doubt about it: death stranding is a weird fucking game. Let me try to sum up the premise: you are a delivery man who must travel a world devastated by the reappearance of the dead, only visible when you are bonded to a baby in a jar. You’ll face off against these undead, trying to keep your baby calm and happy while also tending to your packages, confronting a Troy Baker-voiced antagonist, and attempting to relate to at least some of his overly exhilarating and drawn-out narrative to remove understanding of what the hell it all was.
Continue reading: death stranding: The my city review
All the weird, avant-garde nonsense of its narrative and gameplay aside, death stranding is at its core an open-world game that relies heavily on item and resource management. You’ll have to use ladders, ropes, 3D printed bridges and structures, and even some weapons and vehicles in your journey across the seemingly empty and desolate United States. Combat is almost always preceded by stealth, and while you might think that delivering packages is boring, the long distances you travel, often in silence, offer genuine moments of contemplation and space to ponder the intricate and eccentric narrative of the… to think about the game. Her own life, whether Joel did the right thing by shooting the hospital, what’s for lunch, etc.
There is also a Joycean level of interconnected text depth death stranding. The narrative plays with words that have multiple meanings depending on perspective; and it has an eerie resonance with many things we are dealing with in the 21st century in relation to the internet, connectivity and mutual trust in society.
Sometimes death strandingThe narration and dialogue of sounds like it’s hurling pure gibberish at you; and then a character will drop a single line of dialogue like “I brought you a metaphor,” or you’ll stumble upon an intriguing email about civilizations and extinctions, and you just can’t help but ponder the direct and indirect meaning of especially for hours (especially when you’re stoned).
As well as The last of us gives you resonant themes like violence, loss and togetherness to ponder, death stranding presents an intriguing cognitive puzzle box for you to bounce around in your head.
Don’t bother with the original version either. Jump straight into that Director’s Cut If you can.
