3 ms·

I'm halfway (?) through playing Death Stranding right now, and I'm enjoying it. It is, to me, a really compelling game. It is really interesting the new gamepl

I'm halfway (?) through playing Death Stranding right now, and I'm enjoying it. It is, to me, a really compelling game. It is really interesting the new gameplay loops and player interactions that Kojima has found. Death Stranding is a connected single-player game. You never see other players, but your world is quickly populated by everything they've built to help themselves -- and you. And fascinatingly, once I had the resources to spare, I started contributing to structures or building my own, just in the hope that some other anonymous player, that I would never meet or interact with, could benefit just like I did. In a gaming landscape filled with aggressively competitive (Battle Royale!) or at least "tit-for-tat" interactions, I've never seen another game implement so brilliantly "pay it forward."

wildrhythms 7y ago
One aspect of Death Stranding I'm still fascinated by is its punishment of fast travel. It's like the antithesis of any other modern open world game (like Ghost Recon Wildlands, Far Cry 5, Horizon Zero Dawn...) where traversing the open world is largely negated by the ability to simply warp to the objective area. In Death Stranding, however, I'm forced to give up all of my inventory to fast travel; the game is centered around the travel itself. I've never experienced a similar game, where I'm plotting a course and deciding how many ladders and ropes I might need, and how heavy of a load I can safely bring with me. Absolutely fascinating, I still haven't finished the game because I'm obsessed with the side objectives and feeling like I'm helping other players by constructing roads.