Death Stranding review: As good as you hoped, as strange as you expected – and yet somehow still shocking

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The game takes place in a dystopian world in which the US has been shattered into cities, which have lost contact with each other and therefore need you – Sam Porter Bridges – to deliver physical goods and link them back up to something like the internet. And if you're ever in danger of taking it too seriously, you realise that a central dynamic of the game involves throwing bodily fluids at ghosts or growing mushrooms by urinating on some grass. Much has been made of the stars of the game – Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen are especially powerful as actors – but they slot seamlessly into its broader world, which is populated with babies in tanks and holograms but nonetheless feels real and intimate. Death Stranding is probably the most profound and thoughtful game ever made, more rich and more powerful than anything before.