Okay fuck Hideo Kojima over the asexuality thing in Death Stranding, but also fuck him for making a game that basically feels like it summed up 2020 in 2019.
I’m only a couple hours into the PC version (barely running on my laptop at the lowest graphics settings lmao), but I have immediately taken to the vibe this game is trying to give off. And I am basically with Sam Porter Bridges all the way.
The very early game plot is this: The world has ended and Democrats still exist. They’ve turned into the Reconstructionist movement, they want to rebuild America in its former image, presidency (that starts to look more like a royal family literally 30 minutes into the game) and all. The idea behind Reconstructionism is that if Americans can’t pull together to scrape a Nation together, then all of humanity will die. It will be the end For Real.
And Sam Porter Bridges? Well, he’s hired to dispose of a corpse, that corpse becomes a “BT” (beached thing), and it causes a voidout that wipes Central KNOT City and almost the entire Reconstructionist movement off the map. Coming out of that experience as a “repatriate” (someone who can return from the land of the dead), Sam is immediately drafted by BRIDGES to work on his mother’s – who is the President – reconstruction project.
And he says no, at first.
And honestly, I am currently inclined to agree with him.
The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed, if not ended, the way of life many of us led prior to like, February. Things are Different Now™ in vital ways, even in states where the worst seemingly has passed. The novel coronavirus has not died in the summer heat like we thought it would; instead, it has made a resurgence in basically every state. And it’s almost guaranteed to get worse in the fall and winter. That’s hard to think about right now because it’s already so bad, but we’re basically running on the emergency gallon of fuel you might see someone uncannily prepared for a disaster carry in their car at all times. The problem is, we still haven’t pulled up on a gas station with anything left to refuel us.
Essential workers are running the economy basically single-handed, and they’re dying. Or being evicted. Or getting fired for frivolous reasons. Tens of millions of Americans just straight up don’t fucking have a job anymore and have been trying to get unemployment, a million people per week at a time, for seventeen fucking weeks. Like at this point I am not sure how you can fix this. A $1200 check and a “thank you for staying alive, dear Human Capital Stock” note seem insulting now. America is dying and I don’t really see a reason why we should want to resuscitate it in its current form.
The next president is either going to actively kill most of us or he’s going to have a hell of a time trying to clean up the last guy’s mess. And we’re expected to simply keep on keeping on in the meantime. It’s an insult. It’s infuriating. You’ve heard all of this before.
So what can we do about it?
In Death Stranding, Sam Porter Bridges makes a trek on foot across an unrecognizable, dubiously-scaled America, reconnecting different KNOTs to a larger rope that stretches from Capital KNOT City in old Washington DC to the Pacific coast. There’s a lot of goofy shit in there like all the dumb names of every character that isn’t Sam, the fact that every aspect of human life seems to revolve around a child’s play-ass concept of like, little green army men and monster fucking energy and a man who sticks his tongue out at you and flips the camera off if you linger on him too long, and all the nonsensical supernatural events – but ultimately I think it’s earnestly trying to answer that question. The world has ended. What do we do next? Do we reconnect with each other and try to live just a bit longer, or let go and fade into history?
If you have any idea how to answer, that would be rad, because I’m fresh out of ideas.
It’s a genuine pleasure to have you here reading our work. Please consider donating to Black Lives Matter, the NAACP and other local organizations doing anti-racist and anti-police brutality work. If you enjoy the site, follow us on Twitter. If you’d like to read a bunch of work like this, you can check out this book-esque object over at itch.io and the Apple Books store!
Additionally, we now have a Patreon (again) and a Substack newsletter you can sign up for. Doing so supports the site and helps us reach our goal of being able to pay other people to come say hi sometimes.