#DEATH STRANDING HIGGS FULL#

He’s presented to us as a scientist, a researcher. Instead, it is about watching people with deep, truly exceptional traumas attempt to live on after the end of the world.ĭeath Stranding is about using Sam as a way to see these coping strategies in the face of the death of everything. Though we experience this from the viewpoint of Sam, these scenes are almost never about him. They monologue about their lives, and the dramatic work of the game is about trying to see how that moves their story and their perspective. We’re here to watch something play out, not to craft it in our image.Īt its core, Death Stranding is a game about giving characters other than Sam the ability to show you their world. In contrast with other talky genres of games (visual novels, RPGs, whatever Disco Elysium is), Death Stranding has zero interest in letting the player intervene or make choices in its narrative. When those happen, in fact, they’re the most uninteresting parts of the game. Their plots move by the micromillimeters of facial expressions and faint touches, not explosions or gunfire. They have tones and notes of melancholy unmatched by other games. The ways they fit into their world, and how they want to fit into their world, was so much more poignant and touched than Sam’s own epic journey. Instead, I found that Sam seemed more like a side character in the lives of all of the other people we meet along the way.

It is powerful, and when it works it works well, but what I was struck by in the game had very little to do with Sam’s story and its connection to the potential flourishing or annihilation of all life on the planet. The mechanics work metaphorically with the broader plot to deliver a product that connects geologic timescales up with the intimate finitude of a few human lives. As director and writer Hideo Kojima said before launch, “it's about making people think about the meaning of connection.” That’s Sam’s story. He’s hooking them into a thing called the chiral network, which allows them to print structures, but he’s also putting them in contact with those other cities, their people, and their history.

#DEATH STRANDING HIGGS FULL#

Spoiler Warning: This article chock full of spoilers about major and minor subplots in Death Stranding.ĭeath Stranding purports to be a game about a man named Sam reconnecting cities across America.

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.

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