![]() The destination in Death Stranding is de-emphasized nearly to the point of irrelevance, it is the act of journeying that is the complete focus, and I hope we see more games with this mindset pick up the baton where Kojima and his team left it. Instead, Death Stranding‘s mechanical weight is focused on two completely distinct sources of fun: the fun of learning to navigate and traverse a fundamentally hostile landscape, and the fun of slowly engineering and building upon this landscape to make it less fundamentally hostile. There is no content or secrets or items or anything to be discovered in the post-Death Stranding America presented by this game, no treasure chests or secret bosses to uncover. Fundamentally, though, Spider-Man and Breath of the Wild and many of these other games still think about open worlds in fundamentally the same way: it’s still a buffet of content that players engage with primarily for the content that lies within.ĭeath Stranding completely bucks that trend. ![]() Even games which might be thought to buck this trend don’t really, they just spend a bit more care trying to make that wandering a bit more enjoyable, like the swinging in Marvel’s Spider-Man, which an enjoyable enough process to make the traversal in that game interesting. In so many games, an open world is just a receptacle of stuff to do, a buffet that players must slog through in order to get to the content they want, hoping that players will find the act of wandering enjoyable enough unto itself that the game is justified in not simply just letting players launch any particular activity they want from a menu instead. There are a lot of amazing things about Death Stranding, but for me the thing I find myself thinking about the most recently is the way Death Stranding really presents a new conceptualization of an open world as a design. ![]() I included Death Stranding in my Best Games of the Decade list last year, but I technically didn’t reach the game’s incredible ending until January of this year, and my opinion, as I predicted, still hasn’t changed: Death Stranding is one of the best video games ever made. ![]() I managed to just barely make this one, seeing the credits roll on Helltaker (a game that does not make this list, but is delightful, takes about an hour, and is free, so there’s the shout out for that) and, in celebration, I’d like to take a bit of time to talk about the best stuff I played and the really interesting design that I was able to see. As a result, every year I set myself goals for a certain number of games, movies, and books to finish before New Year’s Eve, and this year I accomplished a first of actually meeting one of those goals: seeing credits roll on 30 video games new and old. So, we’re finally done with that hell year, and while the new year is mostly significant for bookkeeping purposes rather than any tangible effect on the world, it is a good time to sit back and reflect on the year before, which in the context of this blog, I’m going to do by reflecting on the games that I played while I was stuck at home.īecause I’m broken and my brain is wrong, I have a hard time getting myself to relax and enjoy the things I do unless I can mentally categorize it as some kind of trackable metric (although travel tends to avoid this fate, not that I was doing much traveling in 2020).
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