Yes, the first one. I know, I know… I’m absurdly late to the party.

So why now? I finally bought it because as with most AAA games, which I always get long after they’re released, I felt I had no excuse to postpone this one any further. Mainly because Death Stranding already came out back in 2019, now the second game was just released, and I’m already being hit with spoilers for both games left and right. Thus: It was on sale. I clicked “install.”

And now I’m walking across Kojima’s America.

The whole thing is a paradox in pixel form: It’s slow, it’s lonely and it’s tedious more often than not. But it had me the second the fierce, melancholy ache of Low Roar’s Don’t Be So Serious hit me right where it hurt. I didn’t think I could so quickly become attached to a game which accompanies you with music as half solemn funeral march, half whiny indie ballad, combined with a strange kind of silence while you navigate craggy landscapes beneath low skies while trying not to drop your cargo and keeping your flasked Geiger-counter baby alive (yes, really). 

Kojima masterfully constructed landscapes that feel empty, yet full of absence’s gravity. Towers of concrete, ghostly specters, roped pathways between isolated enclaves: the architecture of loneliness as natural space. You cross these spaces as a pilgrim, delivering parcels and binding together a fracturing nation, one knot-city at a time. It’s a myth of connection through absence. The dead bleed into the living.
Continue reading Studies in Silence: Playing Death Stranding in 2025 →