As an Architect, I’m always thinking about the built environment. This creeps into my gaming experiences all too often and it’s hard not to look at games through a critical lens. I’ve lamented the Battlefield series’ destruction physics not quite going far enough. I’ve praised The Division 2 for producing a workable, connected city with internal building layouts suited well to a cover shooter. I think a lot about games like Blue Prince, with layouts and the clever use of space as a central puzzle mechanic, and I spend far too many hours on my busman’s holiday playing Cities: Skylines. Buildings, architecture, layouts and even the textures of building materials get far too much thought when I’m trying to use gaming to switch off from a busy day. The absence of, or implied absence of all of this is one of the reasons Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is my most anticipated game this year.
I think, as with the original Death Stranding, Death Stranding 2 is going to give me something completely different, and I’m looking forward to it more than any recent game.
Death Stranding put its version of the United States at the forefront of the game. It presented an often quiet, solitary experience in a desolate, isolated world. Whilst it was a game about connection, that theme didn’t translate to about 90% of my playing time within it. For which I was thankful. Those quiet, thoughtful expanses of gameplay allowed introspection, reflection, and quiet concentration. There wasn’t too much critical thought about the layouts of the delivery hubs, or prepper’s shelters. I was thinking about traversing the wilderness and my own want for natural settings. Walking rugged terrain, inclining up into foothills and then the leap up in scaling mountain ranges was a shift in usual gaming expectations. There was no big reveal at the top of the mountain, just more mountain. An expanse of landscape ready to be walked across. This gave me time to think of Sam’s connection to Lou and my connection with my own young daughter. You walk Sam, navigate an obstacle, check on Lou. It’s as I would if out walking with my children, making sure they can get around or over the land, how they feel, and if they need help. My daughter was 3 when DS released and, after the initial covid lockdown, walking nature trails became a weekly outlet for us. We naturally became more adventurous with experience, allowing her to do what she could or carrying her across the more difficult areas. Life imitating the game in a way.
This allowance to just feel is something I’ve only ever experienced in one other game, Red Dead Redemption 2. Riding across the open countryside, through small settlements and up into the mountains could be a solitary, quiet journey, or it could be a chaotic chase with various world encounters on the way. Death Stranding stripped that back, getting rid of the scripted npc moments which seemingly happened at random. Of course, I’ve got lost in worlds and stories before, but not as intently as in RDR2, and then in Death Stranding.
Death Stranding 2 (from what I have read) seems a little fuller in its world than DS. Yet it maintains, and possibly expands on those vast vistas with bigger explorable areas, hopefully producing long, extended quiet moments in the wilderness. This quiet, and the concentration on exploration is a huge pull for me. I can see myself losing hours hiking mountain ranges looking for paths to chart zip line routes. I’ll go out of my way to return a lost package miles off my delivery run. All for some quiet exploration. Life is hectic, and the world is on fire, so I’ll take long, quiet moments in a game for as long as I can.
Neither DS, nor RDR2, bombard you with things to do. They’re purposefully slow and considered. RDR2 is a little more in the moment. DS, however, allows a level of planning before setting out on a delivery, as DS2 presumably will. The element of planning, the setup, is key to my enjoyment of the experience.
Whilst I’m mostly focused on the world and its solitary exploration, I’m also pulled in by the sim-like take on combat, the classic aggression vs stealth conundrum. Kojima has said there are more combat encounters in DS2 because people keep asking him for a Metal Gear game, and I’m ok with that change to Death Stranding 2; you won’t be surprised to learn I really like the Metal Gear games. I’d find in MGSV, especially playing in Afghanistan, a joy in setting up how I wanted to approach an outpost, quietly surveying, noting down patrol paths and then executing a stealthy takedown of every enemy in a base. I wasn’t one for a guns blazing approach, but would employ that when needed. In my approach I’d use the buildings dotted around an occupied town, pick corners I knew were safe and prime for an ambush. Death Stranding 2 looks bigger in the scale of some of the dilapidated structures than in both DS and MGSV. The opportunity to plan a stealthy attack from afar, then employ a swift set of take downs to extract some equipment has me very excited. If the approach goes wrong, and it often can, I’ll pull out the big guns, ready to retreat and reassess the situation with some extra knowledge of the landscape, buildings and enemy numbers. My brain won’t be critiquing layouts for efficient user flow or how a view is framed through a window; it is purely a strategic assessment, a mini puzzle in a larger landscape.
As a final pull, I’m also incredibly invested in the convoluted and complex story Hideo Kojima has concocted for this world. I was fully in on Sam and Lou’s ending from DS. It mirrored a lot of the feelings I think Kojima was trying to pull on in the MGS4 ending. A knowing tragic finality. One which I had control over enacting but no agency to change. DS was the same but played out as an option I would have chosen. This ending made all the more emotional after the long introspective journey I’d been on with Sam and Lou.
Death Stranding 2 is a game I know I’ll lose myself in. I’ll explore, plan, and ultimately wrap myself up in the absurdly complex story, seeking touching moments. Potentially, it’s the rest of my summer and early autumn’s worth of gaming time, and I cannot wait to ignore buildings entirely.
All images used are from the Death Stranding 2: On The Beach page of the Kojima Productions website
