Review: Beached as, bro

Otago Daily Times

2 days ago

Is Hideo Kojima the world's last rock-star game developer? It's difficult to think of anyone else these days who would have the clout — and get the funding — to make a triple-A game as extremely idiosyncratic as Kojima Production's Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.
To be fair, maybe the funding part was easy. The first Death Stranding (2019) sold 19 million copies, so plenty of people were on board to steer The Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus (captured here again down to the minute details of the moles on his face) as he lugged packages across a post-apocalyptic United States.
This reviewer missed out though, so coming into On the Beach, I had a bit to catch up on. Oh boy.
So: the dead have returned to the world of the living as ghostly "BTs" (beached things); they brought with them a crystalline substance that has empowered new technologies but ruined others (like aeroplanes); you can see them with a bit of tech that requires you to carry around an unborn baby in a little pod; and if the BTs ever manage to consume a living being (which they seem keen to), something akin to a nuclear explosion goes off.
As a result, there was a bit of an apocalypse, which ended up with the world's remaining population reduced to huddling in isolated bunkers and cities, cut off from one other and relying on porters, like Reedus' character Sam, to make lonely supply deliveries between them across a perilous landscape.
In the first game Sam made his way one load at a time across the US, connecting these settlements to the "chiral network" (a sort of tech-magic internet) handily averting the extinction of humanity while he was at it.
At the outset of the second, he's something of a fugitive (having run off to illegally raise his little pod-pal, Lou), but is soon brought back into the fold to continue the mission of spreading the chiral network, this time into Mexico — and then, thanks to some more Death Stranding-world magic — across the whole of Australia.
So yes, in a way you could simulate the experience of playing this game by joining the exodus across The Ditch and getting a job with Australia Post — but you'd miss out on a lot.
Much of the game is spent just navigating Sam by night and day across the graphically gorgeous wilderness of Australia (filled with what seem to be authentic Aussie voice actors, which is nice), which serves up hazards such as local earthquakes, storms, flash floods, bush fires, and just plain overbalancing on a scree slope due to your towering backpack, faceplanting, and sliding 30m downhill — likely one of the more wince-inducing experiences in gaming. (Oh, and there's the magic rain that rapidly ages things, too.)
Sam has plenty of options to facilitate his journey, from ladders and climbing ropes up to more high-tech options like hovering cargo platforms and off-road vehicles, though everything he brings along with him must be managed as part of his overall load.
It's gameplay of quiet satisfaction: planning your route, packing well, the often Zen-like quality of the journey itself, and the "job well done" of cargo delivered undamaged at the destination (uh, or maybe just a bit damaged — sorry, there were these ghosts).
Your fellow porters are with you along the way, too. Though they never enter your game directly, you're able to share resources and supplies with other Beach players via the game's "Strand" system, which can include answering quests for aid, leaving signs or structures for others to find, completing your fellow players' deliveries, or collaborating on larger projects like road-building.
There's a little buzz to the game letting you know that scores of people have used a bridge you built, but it's possibly even cooler to learn that a single player elsewhere in the world stumbled across and took shelter in the little hut you left halfway up a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
Your travel vlogging, though, is interrupted by regular combat encounters out in the wilds, both with human banditry and the BTs.
The former provide some fun, if standard, third-person melee / ranged / stealth encounters, with the wrinkle of occasionally finding yourself in a four-man brawl while wearing a backpack the size of a fridge.
BTs though, while nicely terrifying, are a bit of a pain in the butt, employing a "tar" mechanic that often leaves Sam struggling to move, and are most heavily damaged by grenades that can be tricky to aim. They're also your opponents for most of the game's boss fights, which can be exercises in frustration until you adapt to the rhythm of managing your inventory on the go while fighting.
Actual gameplay, though, is only so much of the On the Beach experience. If Kojima is a rock star, he's David Bowie — arty, outre and throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, no matter how weird. Get ready for Hollywood directors galore, forensically motion captured, to drop in as actors, Lea Seydoux to keep crying a Single Tear of Emotion while wearing a scarf that's a spare pair of hands, and red-hooded cultists schlepping their evil leader around through phantom tar in a Gothic techno-sarcophagus.
Careening from bizarre to moving and back, the story makes the most of the possibilities of a world in which the afterlife is real, technology is basically magic and people can come back from the dead, taking big swings at big themes of loss, the importance of human connection and the inevitability of our extinction — all while pulling moves like "so this character is called Dollman, he's a possessed ventriloquist's dummy. Just roll with it".
While it is a lot (and you sometimes have cause to wonder if anyone ever tells Kojima he has had a bad idea), it just about all comes together as something that's often quite profound.
Perhaps more striking than this though is that as a gaming experience, it's so very singular — the sort of different that's normally destined to be ironed out of games with giant budgets that need the broadest possible appeal.
You're simply unlikely to play anything like Death Stranding 2 until, well, probably Death Stranding 3.
So hitch up your pack, head for the horizon and think heavy thoughts about how human connection is all we have as our species heads into terminal decline.
Oh, and also, Norman Reedus' bladder meter is full; press circle to have him pee in a bush.
By Ben Allan
From: Sony / Kojima Productions