It’s not uncommon to just not “get” a game the first time you play it. There’s a handful of games over my life that I just didn’t gel with initially, but years down the road I’d come back and absolutely love — Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for one. Death Stranding is the latest game to join that list, but not necessarily because I didn’t get it the first time around, but because it integrally feels like a different experience than I had six years ago. And there are two entirely distinct reasons for that — the game’s fascinating blend of single and multiplayer, and playing it in a post-2020 world.
Hideo Kojima’s games have an uncanny way of becoming even more relevant years after they release. Metal Gear Solid 2 was all about the rise of internet disinformation, and Metal Gear Solid 4 featured heavy themes about proxy wars, where humans control autonomous machines in combat. But Death Stranding is easily Kojima’s most prescient game to date, an experience all about isolation, the danger of social media, and reconnecting with other people.
In the game’s world, a catastrophic event called the Death Stranding caused paranormal invisible creatures called BTs (Beached Things) to appear. These appear from the Beath, which is thought to be a kind of purgatory souls visit on their way to the afterlife. BTs are created from necrosis, and when they make contact with a live human, they cause a massive explosion that’s equivalent to a nuclear bomb. On top of this, a phenomenon called Timefall emerges, a deadly rain that drastically ages anything it touches.
Both of these factors cause a mass extinction event for humanity, with the survivors gathering in protected cities called Knots, while doomsday preppers survive on their own in shelters. This means society in Death Stranding is fractured — the White House has collapsed, infrastructure is destroyed, the internet is offline, and everyone is isolated. You play as a porter named Sam Bridges, whose job is to deliver essential supplies to survivors and eventually connect them to the Chiral Network — a more tangible version of the internet that opens communication between settlements and allows them to use Chiral Printers to rebuild.
It’s a compelling setup that starts to feel all too real in the wake of the virus, where society as a whole had to isolate. It’s fair to say the unprecedented event completely changed people’s worldview, just insofar as the isolation — not to mention the toll it took on human life. It’s impossible not to look at Death Stranding through a different lens now because of that, seeing the similarities, the isolation, and the empty world.
During 2020, I lived in an apartment complex right across the street from a school and a busy shopping center. I’ll never forget the months I spent walking around those areas that were then completely devoid of human life — once bustling places that then sat eerily empty. That’s what playing Death Stranding feels like now, seeing great bastions of human culture and society left to rot — journeying through an empty world just to find a few minutes of human connection. That’s an idea that seems far more relatable now than it did six years ago. It just took time to see that.
Of course, the big caveat is that we all had the internet, ways of connecting with loved ones through Zoom calls, video games, and other means. But that idea is also represented directly through Death Stranding’s gameplay, and the unique approach it takes to multiplayer.
As you deliver your packages, you can build a variety of structures and vehicles to help you get around the world — ziplines, trikes, storage containers, and more. But if you play online, you’ll see structures from other players pop up, and yours will go into theirs, creating this grand collaboration. When I played Death Stranding at launch, these elements were there, but they seem so much richer now with the game having been out for years.
Everywhere I went, I could see signs of other players being there through holographic signs, bridges over roads, ropes carefully placed on cliffs, and the occasional abandoned bike. Despite never actually interacting with another player, you can literally feel their influence on your world. And that’s before you factor in the likes that you’ll constantly have pop up as other players use your own structures or items. It’s a brilliant system that tries, and succeeds, in illustrating how connected we all are in modern society, even to those we’ve never met.
Death Stranding is a game where you never really feel alone despite the overbearing isolation of its gameplay and story — and that achievement is remarkable. This game somehow manages to be both a single-player experience and a multiplayer one at the same time.
But even more remarkably, the more you dig into Death Stranding, the more it has to say about its themes of social media influence, the nature of spirituality, and more. It’s a game that gets better and better as you put more time into it, and despite being a post-apocalyptic story, there’s a clear message of hope. A reminder that even in the face of catastrophe, we can have the hope to keep going and working together. That’s an easy thing to forget in the world we live in now.
