Death Stranding, on the surface a game about delivering packages over hostile terrain, thematically, ended up being mostly a gorgeous, kinda prophetic portrait of industrial society. I love it, and I want to add more detail to it, to make the crags and fissures of its themes easier for tender-footed explorers to traverse.
For a rationalfic worldbuilder, though, there is a lot of work to be done here. I'd describe a lot of the writing as almost dreamlike, having a sort of structural incoherence. Deadman reaches out with the intention of touching your arm, then reveals moments later that he's contacting you via chirogram (hologram), so couldn't have done so. A scene requires a man to draw a pistol, and you only learn how incongruous it is for him to have a pistol much later. It seems unlikely that Kojima-san had something coherent in mind when he characterized "The Beach". I haven't arrived at anything. It was probably all mostly a rationalization for norman reedus to carry a baby around. Regardless, you can't remove The Beach or the baby and still talk about anarchist heartbreak, it's structural, it's doing a job.
So, I want to explore this, if we had to rationalize it further, what the hell is the beach? Why are there Extinction Entities? What bizarre alien psychology led Amelie to care so much for Sam that she couldn't follow through on her most authentic purpose, despite having made him to serve it?
This conversation will be mostly spoilers. I strongly recommend learning enough about this weird game to guess at whether you'd enjoy playing it. I think you'll know if you will. If so, play it, then come back here. (Tip: If you haven't played many Metal Gear games, turn the difficulty down in the war sections, they're not well balanced.)
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