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That’s My BB. Illustration: James Bareham | Source image: Kojima Productions/Sony Interactive Entertainment Filed under: Entertainment Hear us out on this one Before we start, let me say this: I love Adam Sandler. I love Adam Sandler the actor. I love Adam Sandler the comedian. I love Adam Sandler the musician. I love Adam Sandler the Netflix lowbrow comedy magnate. I know this is a necessary bit of clarity given what I’m about to say next. Adam Sandler and Hideo Kojima are kindred spirits. Yes, Kojima is hailed as the great video game auteur, and yes, Sandler has spent the last handful of years mostly being panned. But forget their critical reception and focus on their output. Both artists are responsible for impressive bodies of work that have earned them blank checks to do essentially whatever they want. And how they’ve cashed those checks is strikingly similar. Death Stranding, arguably the most anticipated game of this year, is strange — even by the standards of its creator. The game is dominated by cutscenes and other cinematic touches (pulling back the camera in a way similar to Red Dead Redemption 2’s “cinematic mode;” including the actors’ names on screen), and for the first few hours, there’s barely any gameplay, a byproduct of having to do a lot of setup for its post-apocalyptic world-building, which involves alternate dimensions and ghosts. Because of course it does. Once the groundwork is established, Kojima begins building upon it with alarming rapidity. What once felt bonkers — so many bodily fluids! a baby in a jar! — becomes humdrum by the middle acts. The basic plot, genre, and medium are constantly shifted by dream interludes and hours of cutscenes that feel pulled from an entirely different medium, let alone another video game. Kojima, at it again. Liam Wong The game is equal parts idiosyncratic and indulgent, unfolding at times like a video game version of Kojima’s Twitter feed. Kojima has populated the game with his friends and other “cool” figures (Edgar Wright, Conan O’Brien, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Guillermo del Toro, and Nicolas Winding Refn), furthering the impression that this is Kojima’s world, we’re just living in it. Through it all, the central drive remains the same: You must travel across the wasteland, delivering packages. It’s telling that, though his work has always been eccentric, Kojima ultimately had to break from the major video game developer Konami and found his own studio in order to bring Death Stranding to life. The thing that sets the game apart is not that it’s inaccessible or unplayable, but that it’s so distinctly a Kojima work. There are so few concessions to traditional video game design or even marketing — until very recently, the gameplay remained largely secret, as did the story, with trailers only making the game more confusing (and intriguing). In other words, Kojima has gotten to a point where he’s basically speaking his own language, and has the cachet to expect everyone else will learn
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