Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Is Beautiful, Smart—and Kinda Boring

Death Stranding is the latest game by acclaimed videogame director Hideo Kojima and his studio, Kojima Productions. It Requires a Lot of Balance Death Stranding, presently exclusive to the PlayStation 4 but coming to PC next summer, is as sprawling as the horizon that stretches before my player character, a man named Sam, played via motion capture by Norman Reedus. Sam is commissioned to take new technology to these isolated settlements in order to connect them to a new, futuristic type of internet, one with a mysterious technological connection to reality's broken-down cycle of mortality. Sam's work in Death Stranding is a lo-fi version of the same series of tasks. In my time with Death Stranding, it's one of the primary emotions I've felt.