Death Stranding

At its heart this is a curiously addictive indie game wrapped in zillions of dollars of indulgent and unnecessary AAA gloss.

The gameplay is centered on traveling slowly and laboriously between destinations in order to deliver packages. The more you deliver, the more "likes" you get (equivalent to XP) and materials, which allow you to craft various devices and vehicles that help you ... deliver yet more packages. That's pretty much it. Sounds exciting, huh? But this gameplay is so intricately and specifically designed that it is very immersive and emergent.

There are sometimes enemies to encounter along the way and you can craft weapons to fight them. This implementation is for the most part mediocre and repetitive. Combat is generally not very fun, though it has its moments. Annoyingly, there are a few non-optional boss-fight-like areas that are total slogs.

So, why am I calling this an "indie" game? Many indie games are designed by one or two core developers, necessitating intense focus and minimalism, which are often awkwardly complemented by an over-elaboration of the few core systems. Death Stranding indeed feels obsessively narrow in its design, the product of a one-man show with embarrassing excesses that could have been avoided had more people been involved, with mutually ameliorating visions. But, no, the hero-artist game designer works alone.

Excesses. There is a bizarrely complex-yet-shallow online multiplayer system that was probably a nightmare to design and program and yet adds almost nothing to the game that couldn't have been done via AI. There is an insane variety of point-awards that go into evaluating every package delivery. There are many, many cutscenes that are perfectly rendered with realistic 3D materials and animation, but which are completely locked and could easily have been pre-rendered videos. There are cameo appearances by famous people that probably cost a fortune to book. All of it is nice, I guess. And yet none of it adds much or anything to the game.

The effort would have been better spent in creating a more diverse world. It's pretty much the same everywhere: rocks and shrubs and riverbeds. The man-made structures are also clones of a few very simple designs. If you've ever played the first Mass Effect game, well, this is pretty much exactly how its many much-maligned planets looked.

The story and world-building are similarly self-indulgent. I tend to love this kind of fluffy sci-fi stuff, but the text and documents you gather here tested my patience. It's like the dream project of a 14-year-old kid who cobbles together the "coolest" sci-fi ideas to create the most "epic" story ever. Therein are plot holes the size of whales. The text and dialog clash against each other as you meet characters in extreme and profound situations and yet after you deliver a life-saving package to them they send you the dumbest in-game emails: Hi, how are you doing? You're so cool! Smiley smiley heart heart. The game world wobbles between heavy-handed, tiresome exposition and social-networky cringe. It's jarring and infantile.

And yet despite its excesses it is a truly good game! The core gameplay is strong enough that the weaker elements become tolerable and even welcome respites from the obsession with delivering yet one more package or constructing yet one more road. At the same I think it would have been just as good if it had 1/00th of the development budget...