Death Stranding

One of the best pieces of ridiculous nonsense I've ever seen.

This would have been an easy top 10 games of all time if only the story was written better. I'm flabbergasted at how KojiPro managed to gamify such mundane-ass looking tasks. It truly is a walking simulator in every sense of the word, so it blows my mind how a simple game about delivering packages can be so addictive. The writing is confusing and just flat out cringeworthy most of the time, but the cinematography is often beautiful and weird as shit in a way like no other game is.

it didn't deliver. get it?

an amazing narrative

Death Stranding (2019) — ★★★★½ (8.4/10) Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima, this action-adventure game refuses to try pleasing every player, blending delivery mechanics, exploration, indirect cooperative building, and heavily maximalist storytelling into an experience genuinely about human connection in a collapsed world. Set in a devastated future America after the "Death Stranding" event tore apart the boundary between the living and the dead, players take on Sam Porter Bridges, a courier w

Like my ex: gorgeous, self-important, convoluted and confusing.

It's a game only Hideo Kojima could/would make, which is mostly a great thing but does also mean that there are swaths of jargon and melodrama + plenty of eye-roll inducing dialogue (Princess Beach will haunt the dreams of an entire generation)

This is such a weird game, and really hard to explain. The story concept is so unique, and not really the kind of thing I'd normally be interested in, but the performances and visuals are great which draw me in, and the gameplay is surprisingly fun for how dull in might seem from an outside perspective. Honestly, I recommend just going in blind if you can. You'll know in the first couple hours whether it's for you or not.

This game was seriously misrepresented. All the cracks about "Amazon Sim" are just flat out wrong. A game crossing in and out of so many genres probably shouldn't work, but it (mostly) does. Creative and unique premise is always a win. There are frustration points, but in time you overcome them with better infrastructure. Surprisingly addictive immediate goals, blended with long-term projects. And an intriguing story slow dripped throughout. Demerits for a poorly executed finale.

A fun and interesting delivery simulator, for the most part. My main gripes were: 1) The needless inclusion of boss battles, especially the pointlessly drawn out battlefield segments; they didn't seem to fit with the rest of the gameplay at all. I would have preferred to just play this as a traversal/stealth game. 2) The seemingly interminable endgame sequence full of droning monologues that almost soured my memory of the entire game.