I think it’s worth it for £15

It’s something that you’ll not find anywhere else except for a joke but it’s extremely serious and earnest.

It’s a really interesting patience game.

Most games I think that’s true but there will be people who won’t find a game like this anywhere else and will love it.

There's definitely plenty of fairly serious and earnest themes that underpin it all, it's often a bit hamfisted at it though tbf. Whether or not it's the pinnacle of cinematic perfection (it's not) is quite irrelevant to me though honestly, it just needs to put forth an interesting world and be earnest in doing so, and I think it succeeds at this. It's absolutely mental, and great fun to try and get your head around. It's also surprisingly very wholesome too, I came away with some really good vibes which I prefer to the overly dark and gritty feel of the MGS series.

With most big AAA games I'm quite happy to wait years before playing, like I think I'll probably play Cyberpunk in two years or so. But the multiplayer aspect of Death Stranding is a big deal I think, and it's worth experiencing it when it's still quite busy, sale periods should mean plenty of new people interacting with the world.

Oh there are themes, for sure. And they're nicely reinforced by the stuff you have to do. It's all rather elegant. I'm not sure it works to call it extremely serious and earnest though, considering the overall tone.

GurtTractor wrote:

There's definitely plenty of fairly serious and earnest themes that underpin it all, it's often a bit hamfisted at it though tbf. Whether or not it's the pinnacle of cinematic perfection (it's not) is quite irrelevant to me though honestly, it just needs to put forth an interesting world and be earnest in doing so, and I think it succeeds at this.

It's interesting you use the word cinematic, because I think the way the cutscenes are directed is intentionally not cinematic. It feels much more like theatre, with the sense that it's constantly aware of the player/audience.

Theatrical is definitely the right word for it, the audience and our world is very much included in the narrative, and there's plenty of cheeky 4th wall stuff. The overarching theme is that of reconnecting people in a very disconnected world, which is particularly worthy right now, and the way the gameplay directly acts this out is very clever I think. The fact that it's not just about NPC interactions but making a difference to real people that are going through the same experience as you lends the story some real authenticity that you don't often get in most big singleplayer games.

My favourite thing about DS, which I assume I about a quarter of the way through, is that it actually makes moving something you give a shit about. So many games feature massive maps with tons of traversal options, but they rarely mean anything. Most of the world, you can move on. Some of it you can't. Some of it is gated by abilities which just work like keys to locks dressed up in artifice.

It doesn't go hard enough on it for it to be groundbreaking, but the feeling of moving, of being aware of uneven terrain, caring about inclines and the potential for rivers and fissures blocking your path, it feels really good. Working out your favourite routes, watching paths spring up as you go back and forth (and following the routes of other players) is something that felt unique, like something cribbed from real life.

The only issue is that... the aim of the game is logistics, and the necessity of logistics is to elide all of the above. The end game is to erase all of that friction between yourself and the world. I'd like if it stuck to its guns a bit more, made grabbing your straps with R2+L2 less of a free pass (I sort of hamper myself by only doing this when I really have to) and associated it with its own grip meter of sorts, and if logging on to the Chiral network didn't trivialise your logistics planning. Those times when you're forging out into the unknown are amazing, and it manages it without relying on the cumbersome crafting and survival mechanics of many other games, but by making the simple act of movement the whole crux of the game. 

It's a shame it's slightly underbaked, and self defeating, but even the latter is a side effect of the themes, and may just be an intentional commentary on progress in games in general.

I think there are things that could make a death stranding 2 or whatever really cool. For one is to make the game really about logistics I think it’d be interesting to have a less interesting environment (less lethal and more frustrating) and make time a resource that is something to be managed. In most cases you can make multiple trips and that doesn’t feel like it’s the kind of problem faced by a real Hermes man I don’t know why I want that but it feels like a big omission in here given what we know about this job.

The other thing I think is kind of underdone is that for all the “connecting america” it feels like all of the infrastructure is for me. The roads are only populated by me. Watchtowers exist so I can find out where things that are useful to me. I think seeing people only via Skype calls is a bit of a misstep and I don’t think the less fuzzy image overcomes the problem.

There is a bit of time management stuff to do if you take on some of the urgent orders, if you take on multiple tricky orders you can make it fairly challenging for yourself. I quite enjoyed the logistics stuff.

There's all kinds of things they could have done to make the experience more detailed or more of a challenge; more time limited stuff, more NPC interaction, more detailed simulation of terrain interaction on foot and on vehicles. But I'm not sure if doing that stuff would necessarily improve the overall result, there's a fine balance struck here between friction and relaxation, complexity and sparseness. I really appreciate the game's leaness in not having too much fluff and padding that would detract from the story and feel of the thing, too many games try to chuck in mechanics and features that are quite superflous to what the design is trying to achieve and dilute the vibe somewhat.

There's all kinds of little things I thought of that could have been added to improve it, but everything is a balancing act with design and it's hard to know if something would actually be an improvement or just a distraction from the core.

Just bought this. Fifteen quid seems like a bargain and I've been meaning to play it. I'm wondering if they've incorporated any of the haptic goodness for PS5??

@mistercrayon  I can't say owt, but all will be revealed and it's pretty wild

@chalice  The DS4 support on PC was great, and the rumble implementation was really detailed even on that relatively basic controller. Some kind of bespoke Dualsense support would make a lot of sense for this, so hopefully they update it.

I think this game would be great with a full haptic feedback patch. What would Kojima do with adaptive triggers!?

I can see a lot of people falling off honestly. It’s a very long game that makes you do a lot of long things a fair number of times.

Started this today and am liking it. Visually, the landscape is beautiful - sometimes breathtakingly so. I've had to do one stealth bit so far, and the atmosphere makes up for any less than stellar gameplay in these sections, but I'm really impressed by the traversal mechanics. Just walking is so tactile and involved - I think this is one game that desperately needed a playable demo and I'd have probably bought it full price if I'd actually gotten to play it.

When I came into it I was expecting something much slower and sparse, I didn't realise how fun and compelling the gameplay loop would be. The depth that all the gadgets and tools add is great too, which I should have expected coming from MGSV.

b0r1s wrote:

I also thought it was funny when I picked up one too many boxes and was practically falling all over the place.

This is more fun (and tense) than I thought. Twice now I lost my stash in a river. Then I learned that it's helpful to attach packages to your legs and arms to spread the load a bit...

You can use a sticky gun to reel things back.