Death Stranding

November 1, 2026

Death Stranding takes place in a beautiful post-apocalyptic USA that looks a lot like pre-apocalyptic Iceland. The rich natural landscape is contrasted by sleek, shiny futuristic buildings and equipment all rendered in that deeply mechanical fashion one often associates with Japanese mecha. The point of the game is for you, the player — represented by the character Sam Porter Bridges, modelled directly after the actor Norman Reedus — to walk across this landscape delivering cargo to a variety of survivors holed up in underground bunkers. You deliver biological samples, collectible figurines, linens, alloys, and even pizza. Sometimes you recover items that were stolen by bandits, or travel to tar pits and collect specimens for a geologist.

The reason everyone is holed up in these bunkers is that something happened — the Death Stranding — which caused everything on Earth to die, except that the things that die don’t go away but instead continue to exist in some weird dimension that causes them to float around invisibly and occasionally try to kill you. Since this incident was a direct result of government research, everyone reasonably grew a little distrustful. As you perform these tasks, you gain the survivors’ trust, convincing them to hook up to a new universal network that will span America and revitalize the nation.

What this all boils down to is this: Death Stranding is a game about hiking across Iceland with a comically large backpack. The invention of mechanical exoskeletons allows Sam to carry up to 270kg on his back, which is almost as much as my dad claims to have carried halfway up Mt. Garibaldi when he was my age. With cargo sometimes towering several feet over Sam’s head, the problem becomes balance. To remain on your feet, you must carefully navigate the rugged environment; thus, Sam is equipped with a device that scans the nearby ground and points out which surfaces are more or less walkable. In order to climb up cliffs or across rivers, he can deploy foldable ladders; in order to climb down cliffs, he can plant a spike in the ground and rappel from it — although keep in mind that any equipment he wishes to use must also be carried on his back. Each aspect of the game develops naturally from this first simple idea: transporting materials across large distances by foot. As you play, new technologies become available: you can build bridges, relay boxes, battery charging stations, and more. Eventually, by carrying large quantities of materials to certain locations, you can rebuild the highway system, allowing you to drive motorcycles and vans. These are all helpful, but they never trivialize the problem: as you become more capable, the environment becomes less hospitable, and the deliveries become more demanding.

Sam Porter Bridges becomes a cypher for the player: when you’re having trouble in the game, he grunts and swears; when you take a wrong step, he falls down. When you rest within an underground bunker, you can have him take a shower, use the toilet, or chug a Monster energy drink. If you’re walking through a pleasant area, especially after a difficult section, he might whistle a little song. There’s a sense that Sam Porter Bridges is an entity capable of emotion, which makes it feel so much worse when you try to move too fast and make him fall on his face. It sounds like it hurts. Most video game characters can take blows from a sword or bullets from a gun without giving any impression of pain, but Sam Porter Bridges is different.

For the most part, Sam walks alone in this dead-and-dying world. Despite this, one of the major thematic elements of Death Stranding is connection and co-operation. When you set down a ladder or build a structure, there is the possibility that it will show up in the world of another player, and vice versa. You might be traversing a difficult area and find yourself at a dead end: the cliff is a bit too high to climb, and you forgot to pack a ladder back at the depot. You walk around a little, and lo: you see a ladder left by another player. As you climb, you see their username appear next to you, and you can press a button to ‘like’ their structure by means of thanks. Players can also lay stickers on the ground that voice encouraging messages as you pass by: “Keep on keepin’ on.”

These stickers are just one aspect of the game’s unique soundscape. Most of the time, you hear only the silence of nature: wind whirring, rivers rushing. Sam grunts as he adjusts his pack, and the baby strapped to his chest — I simply do not have time to get into why he always has a baby strapped to his chest — will giggle and squeal. This is broken up by diagetic sounds: an umbrella-like structure that plays a little jingle as you stand beneath it; a robotic voice that, as you enter a depot, says, “Welcome, Sam Porter Bridges.”1 All of these sounds, repeated as they are during comforting or troubled moments, end up providing a sense of security and familiarity. They start to sound like home. At certain moments as you walk, usually as you approach an area you’ve never been before, the game will play a song from its soundtrack, primarily consisting of atmospheric electronic music licensed from independent artists. This happens less than a dozen times throughout the game, which might take the player over 80 hours to complete.

The songs are favourites of the game’s director, Hideo Kojima. In fact, much of what is in the game reflects the tastes and idiosyncrasies of Mr. Kojima. The game stars his favourite actors in roles named after his favourite films. You collect memorabilia related to his hobbies and interests. On a sort of peripheral level, Death Stranding explains to you exactly how Death Stranding came about: almost every influence you might pick up on is explicitly referenced in the game itself, either in-text or via collectible trinkets. Its one of the game’s paradoxical qualities, for the actual plot is hardly personal at all: it’s mostly a mix of high-concept SF and save-the-world universality. And yet in the margins of this universality are the very particular qualities of Hideo Kojima, constantly reminding you that this game is the product of a singular vision.

Hideo Kojima is famous for making video games where you have to stop playing every once in a while in order to watch a little movie he made. These little movies have become progressively longer throughout his career, often running at least thirty minutes and occasionally reaching an hour or an hour-and-a-half, especially as you near the game’s conclusion. These movies generally consist of two or three computer-generated reconstructions of real people standing in one place and talking to each other about science fiction concepts that Hideo Kojima made up, or explaining the machinations of the plot so that we can pretend that all the events that just happened or are about to happen make sense.

The grand irony of Hideo Kojima’s obsession with his stupid little movies is that the games themselves — as in, the parts when you actually play them — are far more cinematic and visually interesting. This is especially true of Death Stranding, which could easily have gotten away with barely telling you anything. This is proven by the fact that even after things have been explained, they remain mysterious by virtue of the fact that you’ll likely forget half the explanations within a few hours. The environment, imagery, and gameplay tell a story that is interrupted and hampered by the game’s plot and dialogue. But even when Kojima’s concepts are kind of dumb, the imagery can still be striking: as you walk, you encounter strange, crystalline hands poking out from the ground — even if you forget that these are “chiral crystals,”2 which are formed in the World of the Dead a.k.a The Beach and appear in our world due to Timefall, which is rain that accelerates the progress of time — even after all this lore has slipped from your mind, they still look cool, and are a neat reason to stray slightly from your path.

Hideo Kojima is one of those geniuses who realize they’re a genius but don’t recognize exactly what type of genius they are. In an industry that is full of unremarkable, generic, and utterly vision-less creations, he manages to create works that feel new, vibrant, surprising, and personal. His signature style is as awe-inspiring as it is frustrating. His stupid little movies, his lecherous tendencies when depicting female characters, his need to explain concepts over and over and over; these all stand in contrast to the majestic simplicity and expressive freedom of his mechanical design. Death Stranding is a game about walking that actually feels like hiking, and feels like that in a way that is not as dreadfully boring as using a video game controller to make a guy walk inherently sounds.

Kojima has found himself in a position where corporations will throw obscene amounts of money his way, and he used this position to create the most polished walking simulation possible, with absurdly high production value and a massive scale. In a world where companies are spending tens of millions of dollars to create generic, palatable, derivative games in an attempt to appeal to everyone, Kojima Productions spent easily over a hundred million dollars to create a type of game that no one has ever tried to make before. He hired big-time Hollywood actors to participate in his goofy little movies about connecting the world and rediscovering the soul of America. Nobody is doing what he’s doing. Not only are they not allowed, but even if they were allowed, they likely wouldn’t have the confidence to pull it off. And this confidence is, as with many other great artists, Kojima’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

This confidence is what guides Kojima’s less player-friendly decisions. While most video games with such a large world provide a detailed map, littered with information, provides a fuzzy topographical map that looks like a satellite image reproduced by a printer running out of ink. In Death Stranding, you have to carry an extra pair of boots with you, in case yours fall apart. If you try to rush, Sam Porter Bridges will trip on a rock and fall over, damaging all the goods you’d loaded on your back. Sam will sometimes slow down to adjust the straps of his pack, or stretch his arms. At all times, the game is encouraging you to be patient, and pay attention to your surroundings. In this way, the player gains an appreciation for the beauty of the game’s world. Delivering cargo back and forth within a certain area, you gain familiarity with each hill and each rocky outcrop. You can’t run around willy-nilly like you do in every other 3D game. The environment has power over you.

I have been playing Death Stranding again recently because last month, I went on my first backpacking trip, camping overnight along the Grey Owl Trail in Northern Saskatchewan. I will admit that for the first several hours, all I could think about was Death Stranding, a game I hadn’t played in several years. The way the pack felt on my back, the care with which I needed to shift my weight, measure my steps across rough terrain, or adjust my cargo: it all felt familiar. The last time I had felt these sensations, I had been sitting on my couch with a piece of plastic in my hand. In the same way that great movies and novels inspire a yearning to visit the locations they depict, while also making you feel like you’ve been there before, Death Stranding instilled in me physical memories that never happened, and encouraged me to go out and make them real.