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The RPS Advent Calendar 2020, December 18thSpecial delivery
Special delivery
This is the RPS Advent Calendar, in which we reveal one of our favourite PC games of 2020 on each day. Headback to the calendarto open another door.
It’s taken a long time to get this far in the RPS Advent Calendar. We’ve conquered mountains, waded across rivers, we’ve even built some roads along the way. It’s been a journey, but at least we didn’t have to do it alone. So please get your holographic signature at the ready. It’s time to take delivery of door number 18.
It’sDeath Stranding!
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But if Death Stranding teaches us anything, it’s that time and distance are great healers. If you were to boil it down to its simplest form, then yes, this is indeed a game about moving boxes from point A to point B. But what an act of moving it is. In Death Stranding, traversalisthe game. From the way you load your cargo to the route you pick through its rocky, mountainous landscape, this is a game where even the tiniest change in gradient can send you tumbling to your knees, destroying your precious deliveries in the process. It’s a game where the weather is your enemy, and where the sight of a road or a well-placed zipline can bring you to the point of tears. It is a walking simulator in the very best sense of the word, and I just couldn’t get enough of it this year.
There ain’t no stopping the BB Boys!
It’s a game that makes you engage with the landscape of its world like no other, as even the simple act of crossing a river can be fraught with danger. You can’t just charge toward your destination like Assassin’s Creed or follow the road likeSkyrim. Heck, you also can’t climb up its walls with your bare hands like Breath Of The Wild. Instead, every journey must be planned and prepared for, balancing the tools you’ll need to get the job done (ladders, ropes, and construction kits) against how much cargo you’re able to carry.
After all, it’s not just you you’ve got to look out for in Death Stranding. You’ve also got a small passenger with you, BB, who sits in a jar on your chest. BB is your lifeline in this strange, empty world, as they’re the only way to sense where the world’s deadly (and potentially explosive) ghosts are. These otherworldly beings are the reason why humanity has fled underground in the world of Death Stranding, as no one but porters are equipped to deal with them.
Death Stranding still falls prey to many of Kojima’s bad habits. The opening couple of hours is nearly 90% cutscene, and the way it frontloads much of its lore and painfully on-the-nose character names and terminology is enough to make anyone reach for the uninstall button. But beyond that opening is a game truly unlike any other - and the deliveries are just one part of it.
Ultimately, Death Stranding is a game about making connections. There are the literal ones you make in the game as you zig-zag your way across a broken (and very Icelandic-looking) United States to re-establish the ‘chiral network’ (a sort of proto-internet that got destroyed in the titular Death Stranding event some years back) that will bring its disparate citizens back together again. There are also the personal ones you’ll forge between individual characters as you go about making your deliveries. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, as some bunker inhabitants won’t agree to join the chiral network until you’ve done a few errands for them first to prove they can trust you.
But it’s arguably the connections you make with other players that leave the biggest and most lasting impression. While Death Stranding is fundamentally a single-player game, its asymmetric online multiplayer elements will also see the work of other porters occasionally overlap with your own, whether it’s a kind soul picking up and delivering a lost piece of cargo or a helping hand making a vital contribution to a big bit of construction while you’ve been plugging away at for your last few play sessions. I ‘made connections’ with just shy of 1600 other players, according to my end-game stats, which is actually a lot less than what I was expecting.
I love you, BB.
