6 years too late, I bring lukewarm takes: Death Stranding rules, and we should all play more games outside of our comfort zone

Death Stranding 2 has reawakened long-standing FOMO: I'm yet to play it, largely because I'm woefully out of touch with Hideo Kojima's work. Metal Gear Solid 5 is the only MGS game I've played (I was a Nintendo kid!), and when Death Stranding launched in 2019, I didn't have a PS4 and had no plans to buy one.

But I'll admit: while I've somewhat come to terms with missing the boat on Metal Gear Solid (at least until the Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake rolls around), the thought of playing Death Stranding has always lingered. My excuses have been whittled away – Death Stranding has been on PC for years and I own a PS5 – but somewhere along the line, it became an Issue. Would I like it? Will it be too weird? Isn't it just walking? Is it really just walking?

With Death Stranding discounted down to $16 during the Steam Summer Sale, my indecision was put into perspective. The game has held my curiosity for six years, but even while it cost less than a tenuously connected and overpriced pizza, I was hesitating. All that time spent trying to form an opinion about something I could just… play. That realization was enough to tip the scales – and after four hours of putting the 'post' in post-apocalypse, I've been reminded that no amount of expectation-building can substitute for your own experience.

When I come around

Within those first four hours, a few of my misconceptions about Death Stranding have already been dismantled. Death Stranding is certainly weird in an oddball and strange sense, but the reputation it has for being inscrutable to the point of being intimidating doesn't hold up. The setting doesn't slot into our grounded ideas of an apocalypse – it's the end of the world, think bigger than nukes! – but you're not exactly being plunged into a surrealist flotation tank.

Neither are you immediately given the answers to why America is the way it is, but I think curiosity in itself is a feeling we should savor a little more. It's easier than ever to answer our own questions nowadays, so having a world that pushes back against being ascribed, one that opens up at its own pace, feels like a rare treat.

Physically exploring that world is just as delightful. As someone with the attention span of a shaken goldfish, I'll admit to being put off by Death Stranding's 'walking simulator' label. On one hand, it's hard to argue with that because yeah, you do a lot of walking. But to me, so much thought needs to go into your deliveries that the term feels a little reductive. I've found myself using the game's 3D map and route-planning systems to plot courses around steep inclines and ghost-infested coasts, rationing my ladders and climbing ropes like gold so that I don't end up stranded on a cliff with six parcels and no way of getting down.

Managing your parcels is neat too – there's a cruel art to stacking as many on protagonist Sam 'Porter' Bridges' back as possible. Importantly, you care about getting these boxes to their destination safely, as I realized while stubbornly wading downriver to fish out some fairly inconsequential packages I dropped while avoiding BTs. It's an example of the journey beating the destination, taken to extremes – the sort of liveliness that separates the open world games you fast-travel through from those you appreciatively plod across on foot.

Unfortunately, nobody thought to warn me that Death Stranding can be scary. I had to put down Resident Evil 2 for several years because being cornered in the basement level by Mr. X was too much to bear, so no, I'm not a huge fan of creeping around semi-visible floating ghosts while holding my breath to avoid detection. There is a secret part of me that admires how chewy and tense these moments are, but to the rest of my brain it's surströmming – it's great that people dig it, but I don't want to be within 100 feet of it.

Going into Death Stranding blind has been wonderful, but I won't dissect it any further in the hopes that you're reading this and inching toward trying it yourself. Even if I'd tried the game and hated it, I suspect I would still be sitting here feeling very silly about waiting so long to find out. It can be easy to view games beyond our comfort zone as intimidating, but making the effort to step outside of the known can be infinitely rewarding. Play weirder things! Hell, make weirder things! Keep me updated on your journey – I'll be doing the same, which hopefully means not waiting until 2031 to talk about Death Stranding 2.

70 hours in, Death Stranding 2 is one of few open world games that justifies having such a huge map