Death Stranding: forty hours about carrying a box

Death Stranding shipped on 8 November 2019 for PlayStation 4, the first Kojima Productions title after Hideo Kojima's split from Konami. PC followed in July 2020, the Director's Cut on PS5 in September 2021 and on PC in March 2022, and in November 2024 the game finally reached Xbox Series. Enough years have passed that we can argue about the thing rather than the author.

And the thing is this: he took the action every other game uses as filler between real actions and made it the point. Walking here is not how you reach the gameplay. Walking is the gameplay.

How it works

Cargo has weight, bulk and a point of application. Boxes stack on the courier's back, and a careless stack shifts the centre of gravity sideways. On a flat road that means nothing. On a rocky slope in the rain it means everything: Sam tips, the load goes bouncing down the scree, and you climb after it. So you hold both triggers to correct your balance, and you read the terrain in advance — where to ford, where to spend a ladder, where to walk an extra kilometre rather than climb.

This is the only large game I know where the heightmap is not scenery but the main antagonist. Gradient, water depth, the width of a crevasse: those are the parameters you work with for forty hours. Everything else — weapons, plot, enemies — is scaffolding on top.

The best idea is not in the mechanics but in the network

The second pillar is asynchronous multiplayer. You place a ladder across a ravine and it appears in other players' worlds. They place theirs. No chat, no coordination, no way at all to harm anyone — only traces of someone else's labour and an approval button that grants nothing except the message that a person came through here before you.

Ten hours in you crest an empty pass and find a stranger's generator standing exactly where your battery dies. The game does not draw attention to it. It simply turns out that someone thought about you without knowing you exist.

Kojima built a co-op mode in which you can neither negotiate nor fall out. What remains is the plain usefulness of another person — apparently the one form of networked interaction that has disappointed nobody in ten years.

What does not work

Combat. It is the worst system in the game, and to its credit it tries to stay out of the way: encounters with the spectral BTs and with the raider camps are built so that avoiding them is easier. The trouble is that the game keeps demanding you take part anyway, and then you see how far below everything else the shooting and the melee sit. Boss fights are their own disaster — huge bodies on tar-flooded arenas where the careful physics of weight stops meaning anything at all.

The script. It explains itself three times over and does not trust the viewer for a second. The final hours are almost solid cutscene, where a genuinely good scene sits next to a monologue restating what you understood twenty hours ago. The invented terminology tires too: phenomena have names, names have acronyms, acronyms have glossary entries.

Why 8.4

For a mechanic nobody else had attempted, and for a networked idea that works without a single line of text from another human being. Points off for combat that should have been either cut entirely or built properly, and for a script that treats the player as someone unable to add two and two. A high eight is not a verdict on a masterpiece; it is a verdict on a very large, very confident experiment in which half the systems are brilliant and half were carried over out of habit.