Death Stranding, his problem is Death Stranding

The problem of Death Stranding is Death Stranding. The statement may seem paradoxical, but it is not. Honestly, the writer does not feel like giving a qualitative judgment on the game of Hideo Kojima based on videos, but looking at all the material shown so far it is instead possible to give a rough judgment on the artistic direction, which has no equal in the triple A area, at least for the entire last generation. It is precisely here that Death Stranding puts itself in a metaphorical crisis: some would say that it is unique, the truth, decidedly more bitter, is that it is alone and seems to represent a way of conceiving video games that the major industry has literally abandoned , leaving the concept of video games as experiences with double A productions or the independents.

In fact Death Stranding is an alien game for how it was conceived and developed: it is the only triple A of this generation, or at least one of the very few, to have expressive as well as commercial ambitions. Basically Kojima is the only one to have received money to play his game, that is, to be able to achieve something that has a strong and recognizable authorial imprint. Perhaps only The Last of Us 2 has an equally marked vision (to be verified) and it is not by chance that it will also come out at the end of the generation. If we want we can add The Witcher 3 for narrative completeness, but overall it changes little: the PS4 / Xbox One era saw the almost total abandonment of a concept of video games that we carried on from the days when the concept of authorship in video games was born , with characters such as Richard Garriott, Mel Croucher, Matthew Smith and others who, although in different genres, tried to move the bar of the videogame medium forward as a new language, a bar that has been almost stopped in recent years, during what we can call the Tommyknocker generation of the industry, where all the standards have been improved but nothing new has been invented and, indeed, there has been a net regression in terms of conception of the overall experience offered to the player.

We reiterate that we are talking about the ambit of triple A and not the world of video games as a whole, where experimentation has not been lacking, to the point that the big publishers have repeatedly given themselves the ideas to steal down to produce their blockbusters (think of Fortnite …).

In short, well it is Death Stranding, but the danger is that it is a unique case and that to see another production of the kind dedicated not to the usual shooter or to the umpteenth involved action it is necessary to wait for the next game of Kojima, as if the industry has produced over the years a single author worthy of being financed.

Moreover, it is also the fault of the players and their purchases, which almost always reward the easiest choices and which are almost never posed as stakes in the face of certain drifts (just think of the micro-transactions). But this, as they say, is another story.