7/22 : Digital Games

A game that left a significant mark on me is “Death Stranding”. It only came out a couple years ago, but I think it’s one of the most unique and beautiful games ever made.

First of all it features an incredibly trippy sci-fi plot that goes something like this (without spoilers):

The Death Stranding was a cataclysmic event in which ghostly “Beached Things” suddenly appeared in the world of the living, triggering a massive amount of simultaneous explosion-like “voidouts” all over the world that eradicated everything caught up in them, leaving nothing but craters in their wake. As a result of the Death Stranding, previously undiscovered particles known as chiralium appeared in our world, rain turned into “timefall” that rapidly ages whatever it touches, and those BTs wander the world in rainy areas, pulled magnetically towards life if disturbed. Ruffle enough of their feathers and eventually their attack on the living causes more voidouts, too. Naturally, this leaves the remnants of humanity turtled up inside isolated cities, thus creating the need for transporters: those brave enough to make the journey to deliver essentials from one city to another. Porters are some of the most valuable people in this death stranded world.

So, you basically play as postman in an apocalyptic wasteland avoiding bandits and weird Lovecraftian creatures (which a fetus you carry in a tank helps you detect, by the way). It stars incredible actors like Mads Mikkelsen, Norman Reedus, Margaret Qualley, and even Guillermo Del Toro, and regularly has crazy 4th-wall breaking moments. The game just oozes with charm.

Let’s break this game down in terms of Darran Jamieson’s four elements or layers of a game:

Challenge:  Deliver goods from point A to point B while avoiding things that will kill you and/or rob you. Also, you must keep balance on rough terrain so that you don’t fall and lose or destroy your cargo.

Choice: You can add materials to stations to build roads to help you transport goods faster at later times. You can choose to mash buttons quickly to run faster, but this will make balancing a lot harder. You can do delivery side-missions or just stick completely to main quests to progress the story. You can choose how to stack cargo on your body to distribute weight easily.

Change: You can upgrade components. You can craft mechanical legs that give you more balance, speed, strength. You can progress through different environments. You can make different types of weapons to deal with different types of enemies.

Chance:  You have to get from A to B but there is always a chance it could start raining at some point on your route. The presence of rain means that the ghostly things could appear. There is also a chance that you will stumble across a bandit sensor beacon that will ping your location, alerting them to your presence. There might be an avalanche or rock slide that occurs as you are trying to traverse a mountain pass. Players from other games might have left you a rope or a ladder (connected through internet access) to make it across a rough patch of terrain.