I’m late to this game, literally and figuratively. I don’t have any current gen consoles and my computer was an old warhorse until last year when I finally went through and build a new rig. So I’ve been playing through a backlog of games ever since. Epic Game Store dropped a free copy of Death Stranding a while back and I’m about 6 hours in, aka “just about through the beginning stages of the game”.
I’m not a Hideo Kojima (the game designer) fan, although I don’t dislike his games, I’ve played Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3, and probably some other stuff he’s done to varying degrees. I’ve enjoyed the games, although I wouldn’t say I formed any close attachment with them. Death Stranding is different for me though.
Death Stranding is a hiking simulator. You strap comical amounts of crap onto your back and walk across huge swaths of post-apocalyptic America to deliver needed supplies or just pre-disaster movies to other people. You do this because ghosts have destroyed the world, civilzation has collapsed into small isolated enclaves, and ghosts can create nuclear-scale explosions if they consume/interact with living people because… they are made partially of anti-matter(???). Most of your interaction is via hologram with someone in the city/outpost you’re delivering to. You try to navigate through terrain and avoid falling down or getting over or down cliffs and mountains and streams. Urination is an oddly significant part of this game. So are in utero babies. The setting hits you so hard with so many alien ideas without even trying to bring you up to speed that your early exposure leaves you awash in “WTF?” moments. A lot of the jargon is eye rolling or cringe. There are ghosts, and some combat, and some stealth, and it’s all weird. It’s got a lot of famous actors and Guillermo del Toro in it. It’s a Kojima game. It’s a lot.
I shouldn’t like this game on paper. I’m picky about “walking simulators” (I love Firewatch for personal reasons but that’s about it), Kojima’s storytelling is atrocious and overly baroque for me, and I generally bounce off of time sink games whose fundamental expectation is that it’s going to take a long time to do anything. In fact, I bounced hard off of DS the first time I played it. I got to the point where you deliver a corpse for incineration and encountered the ghosts (Called BTs or “Beached Things”, the Beach being a literal and figurative beach that serves as the border between life and death and OMFG my brain hurts already. Moving on.) and quit the game after repeatedly trying to make it past that. There was a Marco Polo/hot and cold robot arm that blinked at the nearest ghost, there was a button to hold your breath, there was absolutely no real instruction on what to do if one of the BTs got too close to you gameplay-wise even though your character knew (Hell the opening cutscene is all about that very scenario). I uninstalled it and did other things for a few months.
I came back to it recently with a little different of a mindset, namely the suggestion I should slow down when playing the game, and I find the game both to be deeply contemplative and oddly a different vibe to previous Kojima games I had played. If you had told me this had been developed during COVID I’d have said that makes total sense, and yet it came out in 2019 and had a development time of years before that. The themes and ideas of solitude, lonliness, and connection in Death Stranding were refined before the world was thrust into years of solitude, lonliness, and forced to figure out again, in some cases from scratch, how to form connections.
But the question I kept asking myself was something different. I kept asking myself if Hideo Kojima was hiker trash- A through hiker.
Hiker Trash
Through hiking is the endeavor of hiking unusually long distances at it’s simplest level. There’s no set definition but generally it’s hiking from one endpoint of a trail to another, in one direction. It’s not an out and back or a loop trail. There’s variations on this theme, flip-flops and section hiking, but that’s the general concept. The Appalaichain Trail is the original through hike (Yes, there are historical predecessors but our modern understanding of what a through-hike is was started with the AT). Hikers start at the bare edge of spring, sometimes earlier, in Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia, they walk 8.5 miles to Springer Mountain, and then officially start the AT and hike to Maine and Mt Kahtadan. About 2200 miles (the trail changes each year and exact distances are nebulous at best). There are other, longer trails (the PCT and the CDT are both longer), but the AT is the oldest US long distance trail and is the formative force behind through hiker culture.
I won’t get too into hiker culture or the endeavor of hiking a long distance hiking trail. There are many memoirs of hikers, starting with “Walking with Spring” by the first through-hiker, Earl Schaffer, and including famous books like Wild and A Walk in the Woods. They’re fascinating reads if that’s your thing.
I’m not able to take the 6-8 months off for a through hike like I’d like to, but I do have some backpacking experience. And while it may feel obvious to say so on the surface, there are echoes of hiking culture in Death Stranding that feel too strong to be coincidence.
Some of this is just the nature of the subject. Hiking can be a very lonely, contemplative activity. You spend a lot of time in your own head. You develop odd fixations as the days pass- you dream of food or treats, of showers, of clean clothes. Unless you’re in a group that manages to hike as a cohesive unite, you might not see another human for the entire day, or even for entire *days*.
All of that is in Death Stranding. Sometimes explicitly. But there’s other things too. The online component allows you to build bridges and lay ladders and climbing ropes that other players can use and send likes to appreciate. They can haul materials out to whatever you set up in order to reinforce or upgrade a particularly good structure. You’ll never meet these people- Death Stranding is very much a single player game- but finding these little additions in the middle of sometimes a very hostile wilderness, in addition to the little signs you can leave behind, some informational, some just words of encouragement, remind you that people have passed through, have experienced what you’re experiencing, and thought about you for a moment. Maybe not you specifically, but you as the concept of another person going through similar circumstances.
This is the subtlety of the hiker culture that made me wonder if Kojima, or people on his team, were hikers. Specifically, judging by the limitations imposed in the game, hikers familiar with late 90’s and early 2000’s hiking where the hiking population was still relatively low and phone technology had gone a long way towards eliminating isolation. Finding a small primative campsite on your trail and seeing someone had left enough wood in a fire ring to immediately light a small fire forms a connection with someone you will never meet. You were thought of by someone some time in the past. Or a blaze or a cairn of stones telling you that you’re not lost, you’re going the right way. Others have come, and others will go the way you are going. Or trail registers. Flipping through pages of a spiral notebook filled with trail conditions, well wishes, names, dates, weather, all in the same cheap bic blue ink from the pen on a string tied to the spiral binding. The handful of people that you meet again and again as your paces fall out of sync and come back into sync again as you all hike at different speeds. Maybe you see the same names in the registers. Maybe you see the same faces at night when you stop. Maybe you don’t. Hiking is full of unresolved stories- a song full of diminished 7th chords leaving phrases that you just have to wonder where they were leading to.
Memento Mori
All that adds up to a sub culture that most others never see. Most of this culture is transient. From season to season it gets wiped away and has to be built up again. Registers are refreshed, blazes re-painted, trail maintenance done. Meanwhile miles to your left or right people go about their lives oblivious of you, of the connections you’ve made. And this theme is prevalent through the subtext of the game. I haven’t really entered the cities or outposts. You roll into town, stay at a hostel (called your private room), talk to the one person who coordinates your deliveries, shower, sleep, clean up, resupply, pack your stuff, and move on. This is the core loop of both the game and of through hiking. The places you visit ostensibly have people living very different lives than you. You touch the place but are never really part of it. Then you move on. And the culture that *you* know and participate in, the connections you make, are invisible to those people. But are more real to you than the places you pass through.
I think this is the point that I keep coming back to. The game manages to perfectly capture the low key, small, isolated and overlooked hiking culture. Maybe that’s just how small sub-cultures feel and I’m bridging the gap? But it feels uncanny to have the same social queues from backpacking and hiking that I have from this game.
I know from a little searching Kojima was reflecting on the lonliness and solitude that being introverted and indoors a lot can induce in a person, and that he carried those themes to the game. The ironic part is that his explicit narrative efforts to muse on these themes is, so far as I’ve seen in the 6 hours or so I’ve played the game, weaker than the ludic elements of the game. This is a game whose core loop of terrain navigation and isolation is in harmony with a lot of the story that I’ve seen thus far, and it’s light touch with other players is at times stronger than the story I’m being told. I almost wish the game had an even lighter touch. I think Kojima tells a better story through his game systems than he does through is dialog.
Another example pops out at me of the layers of theming going on here. You get email from characters you’ve met along the way and most of the emails are *incredibly* sincere, almost to a child-like level. You can almost feel the hunger behind most of the messages for a connection. Each one is almost goofy in it’s simplistic sincerity. It’s ET saying “I’ll be right here” and pointing to Elliott’s heart with the John Williams score thundering. And the game is charmingly unabashed about it.
But those emails come from people who are not part of your world. There’s a disconnect still, since you can’t respond to the emails, where they reach out to connect to both the main character *and* to you, the player, and they receive… nothing. Unless you show up with a package strapped to your back. I feel the urge to grab a lost package I find along the wilderness and take it back to those people because that’s the only way I really have to communicate with them.
I hate boss fights in this game
I wish it was all positive but it’s not. A lot of the mechanics feel clunky. I’m not a big fan of the bandits and the combat therin. I found it hilarious that there’s more tutorial in the combat training that you get after several combat-focused missions than in any of the actual tutorials. And I hate the first boss fight I’m in.
The leadup was fine. Weird but fine. But right now I have to kill this weird tenticle dog black slime thing by hucking grenades at it. And… it blows. It’s alien to the core gameplay loop, it’s narratively jarring compared to a generally unified experience up to this point, and the idea of booking around with 150 pounds of crap on your back so you can play football with a monster shadow slime dog thing tore me out of the game. I want to get back to it. I want to get back to through hiking in Kojima’s weird post apocalyptic vision.
I’ll might post some more as I make progress. I don’t mean to post game reviews here, but Death Stranding is an odd game. It’s not a *fun* game by my traditional definition, but it’s a game that makes me feel things I don’t usually feel when playing games and I think that’s worth exploring. It also makes me think about how we connect with each other and the layers of connection that make up the world all around us, and I *know* that Kojima wanted the players of his game to do that.