Nathanicus Gamer First Impression Extinction Level Event Special: Death Stranding
At long last, we have the latest masterpiece from the auteur game designer, Hideo Kojima. Death Stranding is a game about rebuilding the internet in order to rescue the president (a princess, of sorts) who is also your sister. The princess rescue mission is a timeless gaming telos, though I doubt it’s ever been implemented quite like this. The primary play mechanic is that of a walking simulator (your humble servant will cover this more in a subsequent post). If all of this makes the game sound soporific and simple, I can assure you it is anything but either.
The game is very much in Kojima’s hybrid style of Amero-Japanese storytelling. It is both an explication of a causal process with a variable tension domain over which the narrative arc unfolds in stages. Simultaneously, it is also about showcasing interesting characters in dramatic cameos and exploring the dynamics of their interactions. Furthermore, as a game designer Kojima interjected a quite clear topology into the game, to wit, the network. The game is about connecting networks and then interacting with them when in situ. It is a game self-consciously and intentionally about the promises and perils of networks and the play mechanics and narrative structure are built upon this conceptual cornerstone. Even the game’s name is based on the definitional tensions between “stranding” in the sense of isolation and a “strand” in the sense of connecting braid.
At some point in the history of Earth, there was an explosion of life from inorganic and primitive organic matter. This abiogenesis event was the first explosion. Now, there is a sort of antibiogenic explosion in the works. This is caused by the Death Stranding and the chiral matter it releases. Chiral matter, or chiralium when in the form of residue, is a kind of biological antimatter. It is the ethereal substance of the Otherside made manifest in physical particles. The primary antagonist of this game is this chiral substance and its effects, up to and including death on contact and absorption.
One of the second order effects of proximity to chiral is the emergence of adaptations such as the extinction gene which enables Homo ludens to visualize or at least sense the presence of the chiral. This is in addition to a host of effects on human biophysiological systems, including the endocrine and neurological systems, as well as correspondent effects of the latter on the mental body system (as manifested in anxiety syndromes such as phobias). This brings us to our antagonist, Sam. Sam is a porter, having apparently been a strand at one point or another in the past. In fact, he has the aptronymic occupational middle name “Porter” (an unusual convention). Sam suffers all these effects from a lifetime of contact with chiral.
While Sam’s ghastly life of psychic and somatic misery is truly tragic, it has empowered him with the host of mutational adaptations necessary to survive in his unstable ecology of intense Darwinian selection pressures. He inhabits some concentric circle down the Z-axis of a local maxima on this fitness landscape, and our job is to evolve this poor bastard to zero-sloped tangent line at its apex.
This sci fi game makes use of advanced technology as essential equipment for Sam. The most important bit of kit he possess is a baby. Yep, you heard that correctly. It is a Bridge Baby (BB). It is a bridge between life and death because it was born to a stillmother (what a reversal?). With some modification and when connected to an adult human via an artificial umbilical cord attached to a portable artificial womb, it extends that bridge to the wearer. This enables the wearer to sense the presence of the dreaded invisible death that lurks the landscape, and heightens the senses of those, like Sam, with the gift. The protagonist has a special affinity with his BB unit. In fact, Sam seems to possess vicarious memories of being a BB, encapsulated as it is in an in vitro bath of aqueous effluent.
If you’re wondering if it should make you uncomfortable to wield a permanently nascent fetus, which is essentially a disposable brain in a vat with a planned obsolescence, as a personal safety surveillance apparatus, the answer is: yes, it very much should. And boy is this a hypersensitive surveillance instrument, though we might expect this from a biological sensor system. While the BB’s sensitivity makes it particularly attuned to the presence of bioantimatter organisms (or anti-organisms), too much proximity to them or too long an exposure time interval leads to such a storm of stress hormone that the BB goes into an autoimmune autotoxicity crisis. When in this state, corrective maintenance is performed by networked re-emplacement in its dead mother’s womb. Yep, you heard that right. One must protect one’s biological data collection and warning system from psychoneurological insults from the harsh post-apocalyptic world.
Come to that, the whole world is permeated with a sense of being a world after the Fall. The Collapse is both in the near past and in the near future. There is always a sense of impending doom. And while the time constraint on missions is not onerous, there is an ambient sense of ubiquitous urgency. It is an appropriate impressional facade for a game in which the protagonist is charged with resurrecting a world that is tottering on the brink of a final apocalyptic end. At any moment now, don’t you know...
Personally, I’ve found this game to be productive of a combustible mix of excitement and stress. It is always stimulating. There are many complex balancing calculations that have to be made during movement on the open terrain. And resting in facilities and receiving and preparing for the next set of mission orders is a dizzyingly vast and deep array of interfaces with which to interact and menu selections to make. This latter process is also additive in its choice architecture at a natural gradient just like the action stages of the game are gradually progressive in their multifactorial challenge.
And that is the genius of Hideo Kojima. He is able to make complex and cinematic games that still deliver balanced gameplay. He is a singleton in this space, truly in a league of his own. Were I ever to meet him, I would ask Kojima san the following queries:
- Are you God?
- If yes to 1, then why do you allow bad things to happen to good characters?