Death Stranding is trash, but not in the way you might expect.

Film critic Pauline Kael famously said that movies are so rarely great art, that if you can’t appreciate great trash you have no reason to be interested in them. I’ve often found this to be doubly true for videogames, where even the most noteworthy paragons of the medium often come with a cringe curve that you have to overcome before you can fully immerse yourself in its ludic narrative. If you can’t appreciate trash, if you can’t overcome the cringe curve, you will find narrative-driven videogames to be a bafflingly unwelcoming place. 

The latest project from Japanese auteur Hideo Kojima has been a bit of an odd duck ever since it was first announced during Sony’s press conference at E3 2016. After being shrouded in mystery for the longest time with multiple lengthy trailers that raised more questions than they answered, the air of mystique was finally cleared at the 2019 Tokyo Game Show where Kojima revealed in a 50-minute long demo, the true nature of Death Stranding: a game about delivering packages by slowly hiking through the mountains in the rain while listening to sad music. Predictably, gamers were quick to mock and dismiss the game wondering loudly and emphatically if Kojima had finally gone mental, and if his stupendously overhyped post-Metal Gear project would be a walking simulator.

Well I’m here to tell you that Death Stranding is no mere walking simulator; it is the walking simulator.

Each mission has you accepting an order to deliver a package to a place, followed by a delightfully Metal Gear Solid-esque loadout screen where you try to distribute the cargo on your person to perfectly maintain your center of gravity (or simply pressing the auto-arrange button which always does a perfect job of arranging the cargo for you). As you might notice, even before taking your first step in a mission, you’re asked to put considerable amount of thought into the weight distribution of your character and how that will impact the feeling of walking through the game world.

Once you head out, you quickly realise that that “walking” is pretty much the core mechanic in Death Stranding which makes this a much more involved game than it initially seems. You will soon find that simply walking in a straight line can be quite a challenge as you lean and bumble in all directions, struggling to maintain balance. Whenever you start to keel over, you’re prompted to hold one of the triggers to get your balance back up, but this isn’t a mere quick-time event. Instead, you’re expected to constantly feather on and off the L2 and R2 triggers, leaning in either direction to maintain your balance against the weight of your cargo, the inclines and bumps of the terrain, or even just really strong wind at times.

Of course if the terrain was all that threatened would-be deliverymen, everyone would be doing it. But as you will quickly learn through gameplay (and then excruciatingly re-learn through lengthy exposition dumps), the world of Death Stranding is much more dangerous than it looks. At the center of all your problems is Timefall, a downpour that rapidly ages everything it touches – plants, materials, living creatures. Where there is timefall, there will also be BTs (Beached Things) – spectral apparitions of the dead, stranded in the world of the living that try to drag you back into death with them. Other than that, you’ll often go up against plain old humanoid enemies called MULEs, former Porters who lost their minds and became addicted to hoarding cargo. Jury’s still out on whether that’s horrifying or hilarious.

In the early game the focus is purely on making deliveries and circumventing any possible contact with hostiles, but your repertoire of abilities and equipment slowly expands to make future deliveries easier. Starting off with a rope to stealthily tie up MULEs, you’ll soon move on to lethal and non-lethal firearms, anti-BT guns and grenades, as well as different exoskeletons that let you carry heavier loads, walk comfortably on harsh terrain, or run really fast and leap huge distances (my personal favourite). You will also be able to considerably expand the capacity and speed of your deliveries by using the various trucks and motorcycles that are made available to you. As if Hideo “Metal Gear Solid Snake” Kojima was going to make a game without crazy gadgets and guns?

But what is Death Stranding actually about?

Set many years after an apocalyptic event called the death stranding, the story puts you in the well-worn shoes of Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who earns his keep by delivering packages across a broken, timefall-ridden, BT-infested America. The state of the nation is utter disarray and people, in their necessity to live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from timefall, have completely lost touch with each other and the outside world. As a porter, Sam is perfectly positioned to travel across America and reconnect the people both metaphorically and literally (through an online data-sharing network) and bring the cities to form the United Cities of America. Sam, while initially reluctant, ends up joining this cause and off you go on a cross-country road trip to make America whole again.

The game’s theme of connection and collaboration is brought to the forefront through what Kojima calls the Social Strand System, which proves to be its most brilliant gimmick. It’s essentially the asynchronous multiplayer system from Dark Souls but I guess it has a name now so that’s cool. As you play Death Stranding, you are connected to other players through the internet. You never actually meet other players but you can see the things they leave behind, and occasionally see their footsteps or hear their voices echo through the air. A ladder someone else used to make a path for themselves might bleed into your game to make a path for you. Ladders give way to bridges, timefall shelters, power generators, all the way up to ziplines and highways.

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This had an unusual effect on me where after a while it completely changed the way I played the game. While setting out on deliveries, I’d always carry more ladders than I’d need, and lay down paths that I thought might benefit other players. A network of ziplines I built across the mountains helped me, sure, but it also helped many others and the game constantly notifies you when another player uses a path you put down. You can also leave players ‘likes’ if you find their stuff helpful, and while this sounds silly on paper, it makes for an incredibly wholesome experience in game. I always get the fuzzies when the game tells me a road I built is making the journey easy for other players.

It’s like Kojima said during his TGS 2019 presentation. We’re all alone but we’re in this together.

If you think this might rob the game of its challenge, there are two major ways Death Stranding prevents that. Firstly, the only way to see constructs from other players is to connect the nearby area to the UCA network, which means every player will have to traverse through each section at least once. Secondly, somewhat irritatingly, every structure you put down deteriorates over time due to timefall, so you’ll need to constantly replace or repair paths if you want to stay efficient.

I’ve droned on for almost two pages now and honestly I’ve only scratched the surface of both the gameplay and the story.

On your journey, you are joined by a Bridge Baby (or BB), which is a baby that was extracted from a mother who suffered brain-death during pregnancy, and is now connected to the world of the dead through its stillmother. Through this connection, and through its connection to Sam, BB allows the player to see the dead, which can be an immense help when trying to avoid BTs out in the wild. Functionally, BB is just another bit of equipment to help you make deliveries, but thematically it’s very much Death Stranding’s backbone.

At its core, Death Stranding is really just a game about human connection. Every story beat, every character you encounter serves to drive home that theme. Like the America of the game, the characters you meet are all broken in their own ways. Heartman has a condition that sends him into cardiac arrest every 21 minutes, only to wake back up and pick up where he left off, Mama is sort of the opposite of a BB where she’s alive but her child isn’t, causing her to be bound to a dead baby’s soul. Fragile has been permanently mutilated from the neck down due to timefall, and Sam himself suffers from aphenphosmphobia – the fear of touch, which makes him unable to be around people and actively seek isolation out in the dangerous wild.

All of these people are working together to restore the history of the world, which was lost in the wake of the death stranding, and in so doing hope to fully understand what the death stranding actually was. Your involvement in their quest to understand the world allows you to understand these people, and finding out the characters’ stories and what motivates them to keep going in this broken world turned out to be the most rewarding aspect of Death Stranding for me.

All of these characters are brought to life by some really excellent performance. Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead) plays Sam with a natural air of isolationism. He starts off the game being a borderline silent protagonist but reveals great depth as he slowly starts to open up over the course of the story. Without spoiling anything, I’m pretty sure Reedus had to invent all new emotions to hit the beats he does in the latter half of the story. Léa Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Colour) delivers an extremely nuanced performance as Fragile, while Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) plays a dead war veteran who periodically appears in BB’s memories. Margaret Qualley (Once Upon A Time in Hollywood) is an absolute revelation as Mama, delivering one of the single most gut-wrenching moments I’ve experienced in a game this year. 

This emphasis on character performance is taken to its logical breaking point with Sam’s private room, a place for you to rest and rejuvenate your health and stamina between missions. Far more than a checkpoint, this is a place where you can make Sam drink energy beverages, take a dump or take a shower. You can watch him as he makes funny faces in front of his bathroom mirror, take goofy selfies, or just watch Sam sit on his bed as he stares at you through the fourth wall, begging you to let him hit the shower. Sam’s animations inside this private room are a collection of Norman Reedus’ natural tics and mannerisms that Kojima recorded over time, and they have no reason to be in the game other than show you that Sam is a real person. As you watch listen to Sam relieve himself while the game shows you an advert for the TV show Ride with Norman Reedus, it’s clear that the only person taking the piss is Kojima. And it’s glorious.

I could probably fill an entire article just talking about the performances in Death Stranding. I think all of the actors deserve special mention since they’re traditionally screen actors with little to no experience in performance-capture work. The one noteworthy exception being Troy Baker, who plays the delightfully sadistic villain Higgs. Baker is clearly having the most fun out of the entire cast and his scenery-chewing turn here makes for a villain you just love to hate.

While the actors bring their A-game in bringing Kojima’s story to life, what really takes it to the next level is the music that backs it up. The background score composed by Ludvig Forssell utilised a lot of dark, heavy synths to create an ominous Stranger Things-esque vibe, while ratcheting up the percussion when shit hits the fan. While overall the background score is understated, it perfectly underscores the emotion of every scene, whether it’s heavy character drama of high action.

The soundtrack also features songs by Silent Poets, CHVRCHES, and Icelandic folk-rock back Low Roar, with specific moments in the story being punctuated by these songs as the camera pulls back and lets you just sit with it for a bit. Moments like these really make Death Stranding feel like some kind of gonzo art-house cinema. While I’ve never agreed with the notion that Kojima prefers to make movies over games (his games often tend to be the most mechanically complex games around), I do think he has a masterful grasp of film language and knows exactly when to apply it to evoke just the right emotions.

At the end of the day, that’s really what Death Stranding is all about. Kojima has gone on record multiple times about his desire to move away from traditional action game mechanics, and he has finally delivered a game that is primarily centered on evoking emotions through mechanics, while eschewing traditional win states in favour of a gameplay loop that encourages mindfulness over raw skill. To that end, the art team at Kojima Productions have created a gorgeous vision of America for you to traverse through, even if the landscape itself is a pastiche of Icelandic meadows and Japanese topography. The colour palette is extremely naturalistic, making for a game world that’s empty but never barren. Calming to behold but never boring to move through.

My favourite thing to do in Death Stranding was to climb up mountains and look and rivers stretching out into the distance, knowing for a fact the river is where I will eventually be.

So yes, Death Stranding is not just a walking simulator, it is the walking simulator. It’s also a movie, a 14-part TV miniseries, a novel, a concept album, a social media app, and a virtual pet all rolled into one. To describe Death Stranding as any one thing would be to dismiss all of the other things it can be when it needs to be. It’s at once a multiverse-spanning cosmic science-fiction epic, while also being an intimately whimsical and deeply tragic ghost story. 

My last few hours with Death Stranding were a raging, bleary-eyed all-nighter where I refused to go to bed until I was done. When I finished it in the early hours of the morning, watching the credits roll just as a little bit of sunlight was starting to break through my curtains, my mum was already up and making breakfast. And the best thing I can say about this game is that since that morning, I have never not been thankful for breakfast. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should call your mum and thank her for all the breakfasts she made you over the years, and also go play Death Stranding. It’s great trash, and it’s really good.