Death Stranding: Director's Cut Review (Vagrant)
Long story short: When the local postman tries to fix your internet connection.
Death Stranding is a 3rd person adventure/walking simulator/survival horror coming from the creative mind of Hideo Kojima and his new team. You deliver packages in this game while trying to avoid the dangers of the road which includes the terrain itself, the weather, bandits and also ghosts.
The story is more or less straight-forward. You're playing as Sam Porter Bridges, a courrier who's given the task of connecting settlements to the Chiral Network, which is basically the equivalent of our own internet but with some twists. The gimmick is that in this world, the concept of death itself has been thrown out the window and ghosts roam the lands between these settlements. I won't say more about the story as a big part of the journey is to uncover the mysteries of this world and why things are the way they are.
On the graphic side, this is peak level of details for our current generation. Beautiful landscape, nice colors and some of the best face details I've seen in years. The only game who comes close to this amount of detail overload is Red Dead Redemption 2. Amazing cutscenes, fluid animations, this game has it all.
As for the sound and music, it's excellent. Carefully handpicked songs played at precise moment helps elevates the emotional scope of these moments when you've almost reached your destination. Excellent voice acting by everyone. Neat sound effects for menus like the MGS series. What I dislike is how some songs are cut short because sometimes you deliver stuff very fast, so you only hear a brief segment of these songs. Second is the absence of the Music Player when you're out in the field. That's a big L right there. Besides these 2 little nitpicks, it's all good.
On paper, Death Stranding might sound like the most basic and dull game ever made. This was my mentality when I first heard about this game. It isn't as exciting as blowing up 100 zombies per second, yet it is a very zen and relaxing experience. In this day and age where online games and microtransactions rule, only a madman would attempt to make a game like this and I guess Kojima was up to the task for the sake of originality and creativity.
The art of balancing Sam's cargo weight while navigating slippery sloppes is realistic and at the same time, so goofy and funny. You haven't truly experienced this game unless you took a real bad tumble while being absolutely overweighted. But you see cargo lying on the ground and you STILL insist on picking it up.
This is why this game isn't for everyone, especially if you're impatient. The open world/sandbox vibe allows you to do whatever you want, carry what you want and go where you want. This game will teach you to make careful decision and how to take each steps carefully.
Note that I omit lot of details in this review because I'd bust Steam's character limit with some tl:dr paragraphs.
I highly recommed this game to anyone but beware, you need to walk in here with a different mindset than most mainstream games.
A masterpiece that will probably become a cult classic in the years to come. Bravo Kojima, you absolute lunatic.
10/10