I’ve never played a game by legendary game designer Hideo Kojima so this game being free on Epic and being itself so fascinatingly eccentric, it seemed like the best opportunity to remedy this failing. I’ve still heard enough about Kojima to be skeptical that I’d actually like it and the concepts in it are so ridiculous that surely it couldn’t be coherent. Yet despite myself, I found myself drawn into Kojima’s imagination and impressed by the richness of its game mechanics. There’s still a lot here that I don’t like, such as the excessively long cutscenes, but I have to admit that the guy really is a genius.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic US torn apart by an event called the Death Stranding. Ghostly beings linked to the afterlife known as BTs appear and when you consume human beings produce voidouts, explosions as powerful as a nuclear weapon. Rain has also changed to an effect called timefall which ages and deteriorates anything it touches. The survivors confine themselves to small isolated pockets and the US effectively no longer exists. You play as Sam Porter Bridges, who works on behalf of the organization called Bridges to reconnect what remains of America. Sam ferries supplies and equipment between these isolated communities with the ultimate aim of building a Chiral Network, a data sharing network that even allows matter to be fabricated using blueprints and raw materials. Along the way, he uncovers the secrets behind the Death Stranding, the Bridge Baby that he uses to detect the presence of BTs, and the back stories of many different people including himself.

So this is pretty much the most over-engineered, most over-the-top walking simulator ever made. I mean the help section explaining all of the different mechanics is so long that it overwhelms even me. There’s stuff about balancing the load you carry, about climbing slopes and walking through water, about drinking and resting to restore stamina, about making sure your shoes don’t wear out and so much more. There are also all kinds of gear that you can make use of: climbing ropes and the spikes to anchor them into the ground, extensible ladders to climb up sheer cliffs, an exoskeleton to help you carry more or cope with rough terrain and so on. Later you get toys like vehicles and even a portable fabricator that you can use to build the infrastructure you need such as generators to recharge your equipment or even a bridge to cross a river or a chasm. There are weapons too of course of both the lethal and non-lethal variety to deal with both other humans and BTs but I consider the combat to be the worst and less interesting part of the game.

And it does work. The confluence of all those mechanics make you feel like trudging through rough terrain with a comically huge load strapped to your back means something and really matters. It’s not just about admiring the scenery. When you make it up a stiff mountain and see a sheer drop before, it feels great that you brought along ropes to let you scale down it. When you come across a river that’s flowing too fast to safely wade through, laying a ladder across it feels so satisfying. There were too many times when I made it to a piece of cargo only to be forced to reload from a savegame because there’s no way to retrace my route safely without the proper gear. The player connectivity features are fantastic as well. You never meet other players but sometimes the infrastructure that they build can appear in your world and you can help deliver the loose cargo they drop as well. You can award ‘likes’ to other players which strengthens the connection between you and believe me when you’re out in the wilderness and your bike is running out of power, you’re be so happy to see a generator someone left behind that you want them to have all the ‘likes’ you can give.

The game presents serious challenges too and not just because overland travel can be a slog. Early on there are human raiders who will want to steal your cargo when you cross their territory and dealing with them is a real pain when you don’t have any weapons. Throughout the game, BTs are a constant source of tension as you need to creep past them and they can be hard to spot. As others have pointed out however, once you get access to vehicles many of these challenges are trivialized. Sure there are lots of rocks and rough terrain that are difficult for a wheeled vehicle to navigate but even the basic trike is very powerful and you can, with patience, maneuver it around and across nearly any rocks. When you do encounter areas with raiders or BTs you can often just burn power and accelerate your way past them. Finally there is combat. Both enemy humans and BTs are much easier to deal with once you get access to weapons. Sam Porter isn’t a fighter though and so the controls for combat are kind of bad. There are also boss fights that are tedious and yet not truly risky. I consider those a concession to more traditional games and posit that they don’t need to be included at all. Perhaps Kojima felt that gamers would riot if there wasn’t at least some combat.

Finally we get to the story and, oh boy, do I have things to say about it. On one level, I can see plain as day that Kojima made all those choices to serve his own preferences and fetishes. These include chasing a woman across America as Sam’s primary motivation, even to the point of lampshading Mario and Princess Peach; placing the character of Fragile played by Léa Seydoux in the role of the vulnerable female victim; the silliness of some characters wearing masks, and so on. On the other hand, there is so much lore and so much justification for all the story decisions, no matter how weird and eccentric, that it works anyway. I mean having the main character carry a baby attached to his abdomen is so cringe, yet the story manages to sell it. Connecting America by having Sam walk around delivering a key that unlocks a magical key is so dumb but the way all of the other characters keep praising Sam and hyping up how much his contribution matters really does keep you motivated. The cutscenes go on for way too long and I really don’t like the Higgs villain but Kojima’s team put so much passion and effort into filling out every little detail, drawing on history and mythology to do so, that it just blows me away.

There’s so much more I could say about this game, such as how the gun mechanics seem to reflect Kojima’s own growing distaste for guns. You’re supposed to use non-lethal weapons on humans in the real world since dead bodies can cause voidouts, Or how the entire game is just crammed with Easter eggs and small details in every corner. In the end, I simply have to admit that this is a kind of mad masterpiece. It’s the undisputed king of walking simulators, nothing else comes close and though I dislike the combat, I can put up with it. The story is outrageously over the top yet is coherent and original. It’s innovative and eccentric in such a distinctive way that marks Kojima out as a true auteur. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d like to play his games more, he’s such an acquired taste. But now I do respect him as a genius game designer.