The actual walking in Death Stranding is incredibly complex: Each small rock or ledge is capable of tripping Sam, sending his packages flying. Then, once they’re on the grid, Sam continues making his way west. Some of the inhabitants take some convincing, asking Sam for a favor or two before he can plug in the Ethernet cable.

This all sounds pretty grandiose, but the actual process of reconnecting the cities is far simpler: Sam walks there, asks if they’re up for it, and jacks them in during a cutscene. Sam Bridges and his sister in Death Stranding Image: Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon “If we don’t all come together again, humanity will not survive,” the president says. He has developed a reputation as a top-notch porter, and is enlisted by the president - who also happens to be his mom (!) - to travel the wastes and bring the isolated cities back into the fold by connecting them to a fancy data network. That’s where Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus) comes in. Now there’s an immediate need for “porters” - people assigned to deliver supplies to the different cities, risking their hides in the dangerous wastelands of America - in this new, splintered country. All that remains are small, walled city-states, completely cut off from one another. The initial event was called the Death Stranding, and it wiped out a very large chunk of America’s population. And people caught in those blasts also blew up. When those people died, their bodies blew up. I’ll spare you the intricate lexicon that Hideo Kojima created to describe every bizarre paranormal phenomenon, but here’s the quickie version: Most of America is gone because ghosts showed up and killed people. Bringing America together againīefore you start delivering boxes to and fro, you should know that Death Stranding’s story is weird. Forty-plus hours of that may sound like torture, but shockingly, it’s actually pretty damn fun once it gets out of its own way. fetch quests.Īfter years of wondering what Death Stranding actually is, I can finally report that it’s a game composed entirely of fetch quests.

And then, at the very bottom of the unspoken quest hierarchy, there are. There are the obnoxious follow-that-stranger-without-being-seen quests. There are quests that reveal the dark backstory of one of your compatriots. There are big, splashy main-story quests. Video game quests come in all shapes and sizes.

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