![]() ![]() To wit, it’s an appropriate, yet still bewildering, choice in the current gaming landscape that Death Stranding is, with all the subtextual flesh boiled off, a postal-service hiking simulator. This is a half-crazed tone poem about an isolated and hostile nation, clinging to concepts of what life means that should no longer matter in the wake of disaster. The cursed Earth between cities is truly cursed in this game, and Kojima and his band of developers have evoked rural America as a very real visual nightmare. But then, unlike most stories of its sort, Death Stranding isn’t really interested in the shorthand verisimilitude of America Without People than the damaged soul beneath. And yet it’s hard not to get the vague sense of it as a convenient excuse for Kojima to not have to truly build or recognize an America resembling what it currently is, at least not in the way that a game like The Last of Us uses American iconography as its backdrop. And it’s all brought to life with a photorealism unparalleled in the medium of games.ĭeath Stranding represents a rather powerful and unique display of apocalyptic world-building. ![]() Those people who remain alive have huddled into underground cities called Knots, with a few stray doomsday preppers and weird loners still trying to make it out there in the wasteland all on their own, across an American landscape that more closely resembles the alien marshes in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus than amber waves of grain. Peoples’ main line of defense against them comes from stillborn and premature babies kept alive in pods only because they get fussy when an attack is imminent. Most chilling of all, the dead no longer move on, but become desperate, clawing ghouls whose attempts to reclaim their own flesh can cause atomic explosions called voidouts. The soil is rotten, the ground has gone black, the sun no longer provides warmth, and the rain ages and kills anything it touches. A dimensional cataclysm-the eponymous Death Stranding-has collided the land of the dead with the land of the living, demolishing the very physics of the world we know. But the connective tissue of Death Stranding’s America was devastated by something much more bloodcurdling and coldly efficient than Trump. It’s with all that in mind that Death Stranding’s version of that map-all in futuristic, neon blue, dotted by white sparkles representing the last remnants of America-is the most frightening thing in the game. When Fragile asks what America means, my recollection felt inevitable. Especially for a black man raised in urban areas, whose blood pressure rises when he’s the only brown face in a room, let alone a town or state, that map was a manifestation of my deepest racial fears. ![]() It’s about how every major metropolitan area showed up as a deep vein of blue pockmarking a vast, sparse, but undeniable ocean of red. It’s the map, specifically CNN’s map of election results by district. It’s not even my wife’s midnight anxiety attack at the idea of what was to come. It isn’t all the nauseating factors, psychosocial and otherwise, that played into the country’s decision that most sticks in my mind. Trump was elected president of the United States. ![]() It’s a small, strange, and dissonant moment that would be off-putting and too on the nose if Death Stranding wasn’t a game that revels in strangeness and dissonance like absolutely nothing else in recent memory.įor this writer’s part, as a black man living in the America of the present, of all the complex thoughts I have about my country-good, bad, and indifferent-there’s one obvious and urgent image that instantly came to mind while playing Death Stranding: the moment, precisely three years before the day I loaded up the game, that Donald J. Finally, it’s being asked in a game spearheaded by Hideo Kojima, that preeminent auteur game designer who will always come at such queries as an outsider. And it’s asked of a man, Sam (Norman Reedus), who’s worshipped in much of the quote-unquote “real” America for his role in its most popular and unsubtly xenophobic television show on basic cable. In context, it’s a question that emanates from a rather odd place, spoken as it is by a character, Fragile, who’s voiced by Léa Seydoux with her distinctive French lilt. “What does America mean to you?” It’s a question that comes somewhat late into Death Stranding, which spends its opening hours repeating that America is a fine place and worth fighting for. ![]()
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