Now is the perfect time to play ‘Death Stranding’

In such a lonely, disconnected time, it feels good to connect — even if it’s just a game.

Death Stranding is a masterpiece. It doesn’t feel like it at first — it starts slow, and, well, kinda weirdly, and the various threads of plot and gameplay don’t fully come together in a satisfying way until the end. The first few hours is a lot of cutscenes and talk about a strange world of jargon and mystery — timefall, BTs, the Beach, the Death Stranding itself, etc. There’s a weird baby thing you strap to your chest that cries if you fall down. You can make Sam, the main character, use the restroom and shower — along with a luxuriously long scene of him showing, with as much Norman Reedus butt as you feel like gazing upon. It’s an odd duck of a game at first, to put it mildly.

Death Stranding is the first game made by Hideo Kojima’s independent company. His fans — myself included, full disclosure — had hoped for something great from a Kojima free of even modest constraints under his previous studio, and we have been richly rewarded. He did it. It is good.

In this game you just walk, at first. You walk through one of the most gorgeous landscapes ever sculpted in a game. It is a kind of symbolic America whose physical presentation is much closer to Iceland and the more barren and blasted parts of the American Southwest…