💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › death-stranding.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:40:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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I am still alive, just haven't updated the blog in a very, very long time. Happy New Year, or something!
I will admit, I am getting a bit tired of running this blog, partly because it feels routine, but partly because I got somewhat stuck, not knowing how to describe this game or my feelings on it. But, it's been more than four months now, so it's time to put it to rest.
Disclaimer: I got the game for free via Epic, and I played it using the free tier of GeForce Now cloud streaming.
Yes, this game has been with me for a good part of 2023. I've gotten pretty attached to the quasi-multiplayer world, building infrastructure and delivering things to people while listening to podcasts and university lectures, for a couple of hours a day.
Death Stranding is very creative, taking just one sci-fi concept and applying it in a wide variety of ways, making for a believable world... but then it does get messy and just throws unexplainable mysteries at you. I went into the game somewhat skeptical about the story, even as a fan of Kojima's pseudo-intellectual info-dumps, I did not have high expectations after hearing other people's reviews of it and hearing lines like "I might be Fragile, but I'm not *that* fragile..." I can confirm that many of the lines are goofy in a way that contrasts with the seriousness of their scenes. But when the game does get serious, it makes it all worth it, the finale was tears-inducing. It's a mess, but if the central theme of the game is "human connection", and human connection is a mess in the first place, then I guess it's fitting? Or maybe Kojima just got a little too pretentious this time.
Well, I enjoyed it, in the same way that I enjoy mining in Minecraft, or flying around in Spore's space stage, or driving multiple lap races in racing games. It's relaxing, and at its core is more fun than expected, but I do need another source of stimulus alongside it, like aforementioned podcasts.
The combat, and difficulty settings. I spent dozens of hours playing the game on "Medium" and enjoying my time with it, then tried setting the game to "Very Hard" difficulty to see what it felt like, completed a mission, realized it wasn't for me, then switched back. Seems harmless, so what's the big deal, you might ask. The problem is that as soon as you complete one mission in Very Hard mode and get the unique triple-S rank for it, the game completely resets your regular S-rank counter, and replaces it with a triple-S rank counter. So essentially *a lot of my progress got reset after switching the difficulty mid-game*, I was not aware that it would happen, and by the time I realized it, I did not feel like resetting to a previous save. On top of that, well, the game does get somewhat boring after 100+ hours, and I didn't feel rewarded enough for grinding SSS-ranks, so at some point I had to cut my losses and just finish the darn game. The fact that it's addicting speaks well for the game, but, well, admittedly some of it might have been a waste of my time.
Overall my personal score for Death Stranding is *8 out of 10*. It is far from perfect, but if you have even a remote interest in this game, then play it, you will be very pleasantly surprised.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I used cloud gaming to play this! You might think that it would work okay for a slower-paced game such as this, but in reality, since every step counts and every (literal) slip-up is punished, it means that minor network problems result in GeForce Now not registering my keyboard input and thus me falling flat on my face, or off of a cliff. It's not necessarily a Game Over, but it does mean you can say goodbye to your S(SS)-rank. This happened maybe once every 2 hours or so, but it does add up over the course of 100+ hours of gameplay. *But hey, the game does look gorgeous, even with video streaming artifacts.*
Game finished 2023-09-20 - 150h
gardenapple - 2024-01-07