We open on a black screen and a raspy voice-over describing a series of explosions, followed by a panoramic shot of a landscape riven by silver water snaking across the flat. Then spectacular skies, and outcroppings of rocks covered in plush moss, and a long, deep crevice. There are blue mountains in the distance, and dark earth pocked like the moon. Lonely music by the band Low Roar, Californian by way of Iceland, and the opening credits, in small white print: Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, Margaret Qualley, Guillermo del Toro. A motorbike kicks up dust. Finally, a man, riding it—it’s Reedus, a familiar face from “The Walking Dead” and “The Boondock Saints,” though here he’s rendered uncanny by motion capture and digital animation. This isn’t a movie, though it has made every effort to look like one. It’s Death Stranding, Sony’s biggest, and strangest, video game of the year. Dame Helen Mirren attended the launch party.
The game’s creator is Hideo Kojima, a self-styled auteur and a cinephile, and a legend in the world of video games. Kojima went to work for Konami more than thirty years ago, when he was in his early twenties, and oversaw the completion of the genre-defining game Metal Gear. The sequel that Kojima wrote and directed, Metal Gear Solid, made him a celebrity, and he created his own studio within Konami, called Kojima Productions. But, in 2015, he left Konami under somewhat murky and clearly acrimonious circumstances—a planned collaboration with del Toro on a new version of the popular horror game Silent Hill was cancelled; a playable demo of it was yanked from the PlayStation store. Kojima relaunched his studio as an independent entity, and, before long, hints of Death Stranding, the first game from the new Kojima Productions, began appearing on social media and at gamer events. Last spring, Kojima and Reedus appeared at the Tribeca Film Festival to discuss the game. In late May, an eight-minute trailer announcing its release date appeared on YouTube, and was watched more than two million times in the first six hours that it was up.
I didn’t know what to make of that trailer, or any of the ones that came before and after it. They were bizarre, beautiful, and impossible to piece together. But the more I learned about the game, the more it intrigued me—in part because I don’t actually play video games, and it sounded like manipulating a controller would be, in this case, almost beside the point. (It was reported, for instance, that Death Stranding would have a “very easy” mode for those who were interested in the game but weren’t gamers.) Aside from some Tetris on a Game Boy when I was about ten, my entire experience of video games has been secondhand: my husband plays, and I watch. Watching someone master new skills and navigate strange terrains can be fun, and many games have cinematic elements—stunning, fully realized worlds; sophisticated character development; plot twists. Death Stranding, it was clear, would take this to an extreme. In the main story, which takes around fifty hours to complete, there are around nine hours of cut scenes, stretches in which the gameplay stops. It really is like watching a movie—an absurdly long, messy, beautiful, ridiculous, occasionally moving, and frequently self-indulgent movie. Only later did I realize what I’d missed by experiencing it this way.
Death Stranding is set some time after an extinction-level event has destroyed the United States and opened a portal between the living and the dead. Ghosts, called B.T.s, for “beached things,” try to drag the living into pools of tar. Reedus’s character, controlled by the player, is a porter for a company called Bridges; his name is Sam Porter Bridges. (Subtlety is not the guiding principle here.) Sam is tasked with heading west across the former U.S. and persuading the people he encounters to join the new United Cities of America, which is essentially a communications network. And that, more or less, is what the gameplay consists of: walking, driving, delivering things. Imagine a Marvel movie, except the hero is a UPS man, and he doesn’t kill anyone, and the director is clearly gunning for an Oscar.
Reviews have been mixed. Some object to the long-winded and sometimes sophomoric philosophizing that characters are prone to—something of a Kojima trademark. Both admiring critics and much of the game-playing populace have described Death Stranding as “boring”; it’s been called a “walking simulator,” a type of game in which the point is just to move around. In fact, the gameplay in Death Stranding can be quite difficult, but the challenge comes less from trying to beat bosses or outmaneuver enemies and more from trying to cross a deep river, say, or balance a lot of unwieldy packages on uneven terrain. You cannot summon a military-grade armory with the push of a button—nor, the game suggests, should you want to. Everything has to fit on Sam’s person. He gets tired. He can lose his footing. Sometimes, he has to stop to piss. He carries a Bridge Baby, or B.B., in a jar. The B.B. is a piece of equipment for helping Sam with B.T.s, but it coos and cries and can be soothed, and it comes to seem more cute than creepy.
Connection, of course, is the game’s great theme, and it’s encouraged in a variety of ways: in the reciprocity of giving and gratitude; in the literal building of infrastructure; in the way that players, connected to the Internet, can leave behind encouraging notes or equipment for other players who are online. (The various “Sams” never see each other.) In a half-hour documentary about Death Stranding that aired on the BBC earlier this month, Kojima described the game as a reaction to the gratuitous violence in much of contemporary entertainment, and to the corrosive atmosphere of social media, and to Brexit and the Trump Presidency. Sam, more than once, is told to “make America whole again.”
This is the aspect of the game that left me ambivalent. The notion that encouraging gamers to leave imaginary ropes by the sides of cliffs to help other imaginary Sams rappel down imaginary mountains would meaningfully alter the hyperviolence and alienation of contemporary American life seemed naïve, and self-aggrandizing, and there were many, many moments in Death Stranding that made me roll my eyes. And yet I came to think that there was something quietly profound, and even radical, about the game—not in its heavy-handed moralizing but in the grinding slowness of its gameplay. So much of what Death Stranding asks a player to do consists of regaining balance when Sam stumbles, or managing fatigue, or distributing the weight of packages, or dealing with logistics, or lulling the B.B., or just listening to other characters pontificate about the porous boundary between life and death. Death Stranding loudly announces that it is about building relationships. But, really, it is about patience.
I have spent most of the past two years caring for a small child, and I have devoted much of that time catching myself as I stumble, trying to master complex but dull logistics, figuring out how to properly distribute weight while carrying too many things, lulling and listening. There is no comparison between calming a real baby and shaking a PlayStation controller, but there is a value in recognizing that relationships and connections aren’t usually born from grand gestures or heroic interventions. They are built on small and often boring actions. They take time. They resist shortcuts and optimization. I don’t know what Death Stranding says about the future of gaming, or of movies, but it does model a kind of arduous attention that seems important—for making America whole, sure, but also for less grandiose tasks, like raising children, or helping strangers. It’s a mistake to think that patience is merely a consequence of caring, or of working toward some larger goal. Sometimes, patience comes first.
