Death Stranding: Director’s Cut review – I’m finally a believer

This is not only a review of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. This is a review of Death Stranding.

Let me explain.

On November 8, 2019, after three years of nebulous trailers and confusing gameplay demos, Kojima Productions released Death stranded, his first project as an independent studio. I played it for 15 hours and didn’t enjoy a single one of them. I played the part of an exhausted man hauling boxes to a bunch of idiots scattered across a decimated America; it was a laborious, lecturer, and indulgent mess. I quickly deleted it from my PlayStation 4.

On September 24, 2021, Kojima Productions will release Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. I’ve been playing it for weeks. This time, I saw the end credits.

Death Stranding: Director’s Cut is a bizarre game about a carefree courier delivering cargo to dozens of outposts in a fractured, post-apocalyptic America. Explore the importance of community and social ties. It adds additional missions and useful tools to the game’s arsenal, but I can’t say if they improve the overall experience because, well, I never had much experience to begin with. What i can say is that Death stranded He continues to preach, industrious and forgiving. It is also propellant, calming and immense. I have played for about 60 hours and have been fascinated the entire time. I guess you could say that I love it.

I’ve heard the people calling Death stranded meditative, and I don’t disagree. But more than that, I have discovered that it is hypnotic.

For a game that revolves around what are basically quest missions, I rarely get bored. As Russ Frushtick pointed out in our 2019 review, Death strandedDelivery orders are pretty fun once the game gets out of your way.. I map my travel routes in advance. I take into account adverse weather forecasts and unfavorable wind patterns. When my cargo is too heavy and I am wading through a strong river, I also have to shift my balance.

Sometimes i just say screwing, and pushing my motorcycle, carrying a precarious pile of briefcases and steel jugs, over a slab of rock and over an abyss because a customer needs his craft supplies before they break down. And sometimes this will end with me at the bottom of said abyss, surrounded by broken boxes and a haze of regret.

Occasionally, Death stranded introduces new tools (a truck, a companion robot and a huge cannon that launches cargo, to name a few). Each of these tools adds its own crease to the simple point A to point B formula.

One of my favorite orders tasked me with delivering supplies to a wind farm on the other side of a remote forest. The capture? The forest was infested with the wandering souls of dead Americans who wanted nothing more than to lead me to bottomless tar pits made up of the many sins of the country. (Or something like that). I had to sneak through the trees and across mossy rocks slippery from the rain. Meanwhile, my only tool for detecting those souls, BT as they are known, was the scanner on my shoulder and the human baby floating in a capsule on my chest. The forest was equal parts strange, exciting, and oppressive.

Of course, he was not alone in that forest. Not really. On Death stranded, there are other players on the server. We are paving roads and building shelters and leaving useful tools for those who need them. On my return journey from the forest, an enemy herd of AI assaulted me and chased me through a field with almost no cover. I hit a ravine, out of power and out of ammo for my stun gun. I was cornered.

But someone had placed a ladder in the ravine and I escaped the ambush. That player will never know how much that ladder helped, but that’s beside the point. They made the game a lot easier for me. I left a ladder of my own on a steep slope just a few hundred meters ahead, what else could I do?

I relied on these anonymous and asynchronous supporting acts while crossing Death strandedsurreal interpretation of America. Geographically speaking, the map is America in miniature, in the same way Red Dead Redemption 2 That is, except that it stretches from sea to sea, with eastern cliffs, amber waves, and the Rocky Mountains giving way to the roving beaches of the west coast. Visually speaking, it is more European. It’s as if Iceland, New Zealand, and Bolivia collided at the exact moment that the Large Hadron Collider threw an interdimensional goo all over the world.

Whatever the case, the landscape is a perpetual cycle between familiar, alien, impressive, and hostile. There is genuine relief in descending from a snowy peak, equipment deteriorates and stamina is low, and seeing the sharp angles of a city glistening on the horizon.

The looming question still remains: Why the reversal? Why didn’t I bounce this time? If he Director’s Edition it’s just additive, so why am I only now enjoying what so many friends were already enjoying two years ago? The answer, I think, is not so much that Death stranded changed, but that I change.

One of the (countless) devices in the game’s plot is the fall of time, a precipitation that rapidly accelerates the aging process of everything it touches. Metal rusts. The skin becomes loose. The flowers bloom and then die. Death stranded he is well aware of how time can fluctuate. It is linear but not consistent. A day passes hastily in a blur; the next one is tense and endless, and it’s all you can do to get out there, take a walk, and remember that the world keeps turning.

I was more stubborn in 2019. I was less open. I did not put much value in the public sphere because I did not know how much I needed it. This is not the first review of Death stranded to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic, and it won’t be the last: Players who returned to the game in the months after its release quickly became involved with its lonely inhabitants and isolated populations. I imagine a lot of people playing Director’s Edition will feel the same. In 2019, Death stranded it was prophetic. In 2021, it’s downright unsettling.

Just to be clear: Death stranding The story is silly. Or should I say: is text it’s silly. It is like The pilgrim’s progress if all the characters were tall. The scenes are silly and funny, yes, but also sensitive. In the traditional sense, Death stranded it’s a narrative mess.

But in his ability to tell a story through his actions, Death stranded It is, I must admit, brilliant. It is languid to terrifying. Evoke fear before cleaning with relief. It’s mundane until shit suddenly hits the fan, and it’s all you can do to escape the fall of time and get to the nearest base, with a multitude of holograms bursting into applause, just like my neighbors and I did all. last summer nights, all but hanging out of our windows while the ER nurse who lives below me returned from a long shift.

Hideo Kojima and the developers at Kojima Productions have long been making games about America – its foreign policy and military agenda, yes, but also the American psyche in general. And nowhere do they extract the depth of our ideals more thoroughly than here in Death Stranding. The ultimate reward for the proverbial American Dream has always been isolation: the suburban house with a white fence, the McMansion in the wooded suburb, Willy Loman’s “place in the country.” Death strandedThe world is less science fiction than a somewhat logical extension of the American sublime. Tie Death strandedThe themes of isolation, community fracture, and collective trauma solely for the coronavirus pandemic would narrow its vast scope.

Death stranded it’s full of questions about whether any of this is worth it: the solidarity and the unity of it all. If catastrophes continue to pile up, humans continue to isolate themselves, and communities continue to fracture, then what is the point of coming together? Despite all his preaching, the game doesn’t end with neat answers. Bowing to these questions in a final scene would undermine all the work your game has already done more gracefully than your thousands of words.

Some art, over time, will transform with us. Some art will calmly, even stubbornly, wait for us to return with a new perspective. Death stranded, in my opinion, it has done a bit of both. He has sat patiently, confident in his mechanisms and gigantic in his ideas, but he has also changed, just a little, as we all did our best to grow.

That’s how it is Death Stranding: Director’s Cut is it worth playing? Absolutely. Especially now. Was Death stranded is it also worth playing in 2019? I would say yes. He just wasn’t ready for it yet.

Death Stranding: Director’s Cut It will be released on September 24 on PlayStation 5. The game was reviewed using a pre-launch download code provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links.