‘Death Stranding’ is a haunting sci-fi masterpiece: Review

From its first trailer in the summer of 2016, Death Stranding asked the world to trust it. Trust that, in the end, after we explored and unfolded its mysteries, we would walk away not just feeling accomplished, but also satisfied with figuring out what the hell it is.

Trust Death Stranding.

Death Stranding‘s world is impressive. The story, with all of its twists and turns and depth, is addictively enticing. The lively characters and haunting music breathe life and humanity into every corner of the world, no matter how desolate it may appear. The gameplay, which primarily involves delivering items back and forth between distant pockets of humanity, is shockingly engaging and fun.  

While Death Stranding nails so many aspects of what makes great games great, there is one thing that blew me away more than anything: The more I played, the more I liked it.

Many games get better as they progress, but of all the games I’ve played in my life, none have done it as well as Death Stranding, both with its story and its steady stream of new, game-changing items. For a game that asks for around 50 hours of your time, this is vital.

But, you, the person reading this, don’t want to just know if this game is good. I know. You want to know what the hell it is.

What is Death Stranding?

Death Stranding is a game about extinction.

The earth as we know it has already experienced five big extinctions. One of the most well-known is that of the dinosaurs, marking the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the reign of mammals. 

An event known as the Death Stranding marks the beginning of the sixth big extinction. This Death Stranding began several years before the events in Death Stranding, and it is not good for anyone who loves being alive.

Death began leaking into the world of the living, and I don’t just mean people dying. Beyond the world of the living is another dimension known as the Beach, and things from the Beach are appearing on Earth, which is causing all sorts of problems.

Over the course of the game, everything is explained very thoroughly

When the Death Stranding happened, Beached Things (BTs) began appearing on Earth; when they come in contact with the living, it craters the area in a voidout. Only certain people who gained DOOMS abilities (think of them like minor superpowers) after the Death Stranding can see the BTs, and there are ways to fight them, but they’ve already wiped out huge swaths of humanity.

To keep humanity going, the president of the United Cities of America (UCA) wants to connect everyone together using a network that taps into the power of the Beach. But not everyone wants to be part of the UCA, and terrorists like the mysterious character Higgs (Troy Baker) will do anything they can to stop its spread.

That’s a very surface-level, non-spoilery look at the complex situation unfolding in Death Stranding, but rest assured that over the course of the game, everything is explained very thoroughly, even though at moments it may seem like there’s no possible way to tie all of this together.

The sheer scope of this game is enough to cause a dropped jaw, but the fact that it all comes together in a coherent and poignant way deserves a standing ovation.

Connecting the country

In classic video game fashion, you control the person tasked with reconnecting the country, Sam Porter (played by Norman Reedus).

As his name suggests, Sam is a porter. Thanks to his DOOMS abilities, he’s able to traverse the outdoors and deliver all kinds of supplies between the various pinpricks of civilization that dot America after the Death Stranding tore it apart.

These DOOMS come in handy early, especially when paired with the power of the bridge baby (BB) Sam finds himself in possession of. The BB, an adorable baby who was delivered from a brain dead “stillmother,” has a unique connection to death and can help sense BTs. It’s tragic, but the BB’s emotive expressions melt away all melancholy.

To connect the country, Sam has to deliver things to various people and cities and sometimes earn their trust to get them to join the UCA network. This often involves stacking too many things in his backpack and trying to maintain his balance while trekking across mostly barren lands, sneaking through pockets of BTs, and running away from package-stealing MULEs.

The concept kind of reminds me of Animal Crossing, which often involves running little errands for the animal villagers, returning lost items to them, and then building a personal connection with them as they engage you in conversation — sometimes idle, sometimes deeply personal.

You’re there to rebuild humanity

But in Death Stranding, the stakes are higher and the walking is much more engaging. You don’t just press forward with the left stick to walk in Death Stranding. You have to watch where you step or you might fall over, and if you’re carrying lots of stuff, you’ll need to maintain your balance by shifting your weight left or right. In a way, it felt like a racing game, where you need to be mindful of where you’re going and stay engaged with the path ahead of you.

As the game progresses, you accrue more and more unique items that make delivering things just a little easier, whether it’s a portable printer that can create bridges spanning rivers, an exoskeleton that increases your speed or ups your strength so you can carry more items, or a non-lethal weapon that’s useful for taking out MULEs. (Non-lethal because you wouldn’t want to cause a voidout, of course.)

Each new item that I unlocked by bringing people into the UCA was such a delight. There’s nothing that isn’t useful, and each new introduction feels immensely helpful in relieving a little weight from Sam’s shoulders, both literally and figuratively.

One of the fantastic features of this game is its online component, which allows you to incorporate other players’ structures when you connect an area to the network. So if someone used a ladder to get up a cliff, it could appear in your game, or another player could contribute materials to a road paver to build a road over rocky terrain that helps you both.

You don’t get every item that every player has placed in the game, of course, because that would be madness, but there are enough there to remind you that you aren’t alone in the world, and that’s a great feeling.

Things get weird

There’s one trailer for Death Stranding, which is ripped from a chunk of a cutscene early in the game, where things get particularly weird. It gives a pretty good impression of the reality-bending stuff that happens.

It’s one thing to see it in a cutscene. It’s another thing to come across it in the wild.

Maybe five or so hours into the game, I was making my way toward a wind farm with a delivery, carefully climbing down a hill into the ravine where it sat. It was raining, except after the Death Stranding, rain isn’t what it used to be. It’s timefall, and it accelerates the aging process of everything it touches.

As it fell around Sam, raising plants out of the ground around him and killing them within seconds, the scanner attached to the BB was trying to alert me to BTs in the area, which are only visible when Sam stands still. I tried to weave around them carefully, holding my breath when I took crouched steps, but wasn’t looking at my feet and I tripped, falling to the moss-covered ground.

All of a sudden, invisible footsteps were moving toward me. The area at my feet turned into a black, soupy tar and human-looking tar creatures began clawing at me, trying to pull me in. I tried to get away, but they pulled me down and I was suddenly ripped through the landscape, which began shifting into a tar-filled marsh.

Then a small, tar-covered whale leapt into the air, crashed into the surface of the tar, and erupted into a mess of tentacles.

I did not survive. My soul breached the gap between the living world and that of the dead. I was floating in the Seam, an underwater area between Earth and the Beach, and I reconnected with my body and returned to life where I had just died. You see, Sam is a repatriate, and when killed, he can return his soul back to his body. A rare gift, and one that makes his blood especially effective against BTs.

It’s not just that these encounters that are mind-bending. More things pop up to turn everything upside down, sometimes when you least expect it, and the paths these events send you on are intensely engrossing.

Humanity amid devastation

One of the main themes of Death Stranding is human interaction, and it’s this one focus that pumps this game full of so much life.

The main cast is a stellar lineup of real people who were motion-captured and turned into digital characters in the game, including Reedus, Baker, Lindsay Wagner, Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelson, Margaret Qualley, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Darren Jacobs, Guillermo Del Toro, and more.

Each person in this game is a fully fleshed-out character whose life has been shaped dramatically by the Death Stranding. Some, like Seydoux’s character Fragile, have made incredible sacrifices for humanity and gained powerful DOOMS abilities. Others, like Mikkelson’s character, are enigmas, but in the end, the things that make them so human leak through.

By making connections and learning about the people strewn across the remains of America, a bond forms not just between Sam and the people who are left, but between the player and the game.

Even in moments when there’s no one in sight, as Sam lugs cargo across vast distances, the game can tug at the heartstrings with its impeccably timed music, which mostly consists of songs from the post-rock band LOW ROAR.

As you are walking along a creek to deliver medicine to someone in need, or traversing a mountain range to bring books to a mountaineer who just had a child with his wife, a song might kick in. The choice of LOW ROAR feels perfect. The music is both delicate and immense, and can turn a trek through rough terrain into a beautiful journey that forces you to take it all in. If there were roses out in the wild, you’d be tempted to stop and smell them.

But that’s not what you’re there for. You’re there to rebuild humanity. You’re there to fight back against extinction and walk through horrors to do it.

“We need not marvel at extinction,” Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species. “If we must marvel, let it be at our presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the many complex contingencies, on which the existence of each species depends.”

Death Stranding builds a complex and surreal world, and it’s hard not to marvel at the way it all comes together.

Death Stranding releases on PlayStation 4 on Nov. 8 and is coming to PC in 2020.