#ratralsis gaming

Well, I say that, but the truth is, I've been kicked out of two writing classes for asking too many questions and struggling with the material, and I've watched a bunch of videos on Skillshare.

I don't actually know how to write. At least, not the kind of writing that I want to do. I want to write fiction. I want to tell stories. I want to take the ideas in my head of characters and their arcs and how they grow and learn and become different people, and how they change the world, and I want to put those stories into words that other people might find compelling enough to read. I want to write something that changes someone. Changes the way that they see the world, or how they think about other people, or even how they think about themselves. It's egotistical, to be sure, but it's honest.

I just finished a story that I'm not proud of. I poured every part of myself into it, and you can find it at https://www.dropbox.com/s/viystzuz3pw7fya/marigold_story_2.txt?dl=0. I don't want you to read it. To be frank, I don't want for anybody to read it. I'm deeply, truly embarrassed and ashamed of this stupid story, but it's a story that I have to tell, and I'm going to be telling it again someday when I am a better writer. My next attempt at taking a writing class starts on January 20. We'll see how it goes. My hopes are not high.

It's a story of two people who find each other and fall in love. It's way outside of my comfort zone, and that's because it's way outside of my lived experience. I've never been in a loving relationship. All I can do is guess and do my best when it comes to writing a relationship. It's wishful thinking and silly ideas. A close friend I shared it with, knowing he would not enjoy it, told me that the love between the two main characters "felt like second hand, borrowed, like a drawing of a horse of someone who really wants a horse, but rarely has seen one in real life."

I love that metaphor. So much that I'm using it here, to explain why you shouldn't read this thing that I felt such a powerful need to write that I got kicked out of two writing classes trying to learn how to write it, and here it is, it sucks, and it's the best I can do, and it's up to you if you want to read it or not.

I won't tell you anything about it in the rest of this essay. As I said, it's up to you if you want to read it or not.

The lesson everyone teaches when it comes to writing is that less is more. Keep it short. If something you've written has an impact, then everything else you write that doesn't have an impact will take away from the impact of the thing that does. It's like a woman's high-heeled shoe, says pretty blonde lady Barbara Vance on Skillshare in the class "Writing Realistic Dialogue: Language, Structure, and Character" (https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Writing-Realistic-Dialogue-Language-Structure-and-Character/1415583973/transcripts):

"Think about it like this. A lady's high-heeled shoe. It doesn't matter if you have never worn a high-heeled shoe. But if you think about high heeled shoe, right, think of one that has a really tiny little heel. It's very high heel and it comes to a a small little point of the bottom, right, and then you have a heel that has a broad heel, so it's the same height, but it's quite broad. It covers more area. Now, if you were, if the lady were to step on your foot with her heels, which one is going to hurt more? The really narrow heel or the really broad heel? The really narrow heel, right? Because all of that weight of her body that she is pressing on you is confined to this one tiny little point rather than being greatly dispersed out. The same thing is true of your text. If you have three scenes of dialogue, and two don't really tell you very much, and then one is actually very powerful, because you have spread that dialogue out over these three scenes, two of which are not impactful, that's more like a broad heel stepping on your toe, because there's this much dialogue, but this much of it it had any value. So there's all this extra stuff. This doesn't need it, so it ends up having less of an impact. If you just have one truly powerful scene, you have this much text. But combined in this much text is exactly the same amount of power, so it hits the reader very hard, they take it in. So again, if you have a lot of text, this much text, but this much power that is dissipated this all this empty text has dissipated this power. So choose your scenes wisely. Choose your words wisely."

I find it extremely funny that she spends so many words (305!) explaining this simple idea. She could have tightened that up, said it in half the time, and it would have been just as clear. Skillshare pays you by the number of minutes viewed, though, so why not repeat yourself? (In other words, I think Barbara Vance is a bad teacher and that her class is a bad class; is that short enough to have an impact?)

Less is more. Show, don't tell. Rather than saying "Tim was short," say "Tim had a hard time reaching the top shelves in supermarkets." Now we not only know that Tim is short, we see how being short affects him. We've learned more about the character.

These are important things, because you want your story to be as short as possible. You want people to actually read your work, and people don't like to read things that are long.

I got my story down to just over 10,000 words. It's the shortest full story, that is, one that has a beginning, middle, and end, that I've ever written. It would take the average reader less than an hour to finish. But I know that nobody's going to finish it. Most people won't even bother to start. Reading is hard. Reading takes time. Who has an hour to read when they can spend an hour watching TV instead? Or listening to music? Or playing a video game? Reading sucks.

So I hacked and I cut and I trimmed and I removed every single word that wasn't absolutely necessary. Not a single sentence in that 10,000-word story of mine is what it was when I first wrote it. The story is in eight distinct chapters, little vignettes where a scene unfolds and then we jump ahead in time to the next one. Each one was originally about 30-40% longer than it is now. If I'd kept everything, the story would have been nearly 14,000 words. That'd be nuts. That'd be just absurd. Who has that kind of time?

So it's shorter, now. The characters don't have as much background. They don't say as many things to each other. There are fewer jokes. Less banter. Less description. Fewer explanations of things. Lines that I loved, lines that I put my soul into, were deleted because I know that people simply do not care as much as I do. Did it make the story better? I sure hope so. It certainly made it shorter. I turned that story into a fucking stiletto heel.

2. More is More

While writing my stupid fucking story, I played Death Stranding. I bought it shortly before Halloween, played it for about five weeks, and, with about 105 hours into it, maxed out every shelter's connection to the chiral network and then finished the game.

I love that game. I wish I could write like Hideo Kojima writes.

Kojima doesn't give a shit about "less is more." He doesn't have time for "show, don't tell." He wants to tell you things, and he wants to tell you a lot of things, and by God he's going to. If you don't have the time to sit and watch a thirty-minute cutscene, that's fine, he'll wait there patiently for you until you do. And if you never do, if you never play his game, then that's your loss. He'll be off making the next one while you sit there missing out.

If we want to stick with Barbara Vance's metaphor, Kojima's work is not a shoe with a narrow heel or a broad heel. It is a steamroller. It is gigantic and broad to the point of absurdity, but it is so heavy and so powerful that it will crush your entire body into a smear on the pavement if it rolls over you. It's the difference between stabbing someone with a knife or stabbing them with a baseball bat: the knife, having a narrower point, is going to penetrate their body more easily. Kojima stabs with a high-powered cannon. The projectile is bigger, blunter, and heavier than either, but its sheer power makes up for it.

Less is more? No, says Kojima. More is more. Think about it. It just makes sense. This, I believe, is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

The game revels in its hugeness and its expansiveness. You can walk across miles of uninhabited areas. You can take hundreds of different optional missions. You can build frivolous tools and use them in whatever way you wish. You are given more options than you could possibly need. In the world of Death Stranding, there is more to see and do than any one player ever actually will. But it's there. You know, if you want it. And why shouldn't it be?

Why should he remove a single piece of it?

3. It's Just a Game

Death Stranding is a game where you play as a man named Sam Porter Bridges. Sam is a porter and he works for a company called Bridges. This is not a subtle game; it's fair to say that nothing about it is subtle. Everything hits you as hard as it can, and that includes peoples' names.

One of Sam's best friends had to have multiple organ transplants from cadavers. He studies the afterlife and the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. He is named Deadman.

One of the people he works with has a weak heart. Every twenty-one minutes, his heart stops, and he is dead for three minutes before his heart is restarted with an electrical shock. He dies sixty times a day and is dead for three hours of each day. He is named Heartman.

One of the other people Sam works with has a baby. She is named Mama.

No subtlety.

When Sam is injured, he loses blood. This happens whether he falls from a large height or stumbles over a rock and falls down. It happens if he is shot, stabbed, clubbed, or hit with a laser by a giant lion made of tar. His health is measured simply by how much blood he has. At full health, he has 1,000 mL of blood that he can safely lose. At 0 mL, he dies.

Being hurt doesn't cause Sam to bleed. Being shot a dozen times by enemies won't open a wound in him that causes him to steadily lose blood. He simply loses blood once, at the moment of injury, and then he is done bleeding. You heal by having blood bags somewhere on your body: they can be in a utility pouch, strapped to your arms or legs, or carried on your back. Blood bags hold 500 mL of blood, and, if you can get somewhere safe and stop being injured for a few seconds, blood is transferred from the bags into Sam's body to heal him. No matter what it was that injured him, Sam simply gets blood poured into his body from the bags and is healed. Injuries are not a thing in Death Stranding. Sam is never actually hurt. He is either healthy, anemic, or dead.

If Sam dies, it's not a big deal. He is a repatriate, a special sort of person who can simply steer his undying soul back into his body after his death and get back up and continue on. It appears to be uncomfortable, but has no long-term effects. He is not scarred. His injuries are fully healed. If Sam leaps from a tall cliff and his body is shattered on the rocks below, it is whole and healthy again when he returns to life. There are no broken bones, no twisted limbs, and no bloody stumps where his limbs were torn off. The same is true if he is shot to death by someone with a shotgun or a grenade launcher. He is perfectly fine again. His soul floats into his body and his body is fine. There is no explanation for this. It is unclear if his soul patches up the holes and changes the parts, or if it's the cryptobiotes that somehow appear in his stomach to be vomited up when he returns.

This is because Death Stranding is a video game. Keeping track of a broken leg or a torn muscle in his shoulder from being hit with a shotgun blast isn't fun. It wouldn't add anything interesting to the game. I know that this is the case because Kojima has done exactly this in other games. There was an in-depth first aid system in Metal Gear Solid 3 where you had to treat your injuries one at a time in order to heal. It just isn't as fun as letting Sam heal via blood transfusion. Very simple. No need for subtlety. Just heal up and keep on keeping on.

You can eventually add additional utility pouches to Sam's backpack. I did. By the end of the game, I was able to carry twenty blood bags with me. I usually didn't. I usually kept around fifteen. Then I would walk into enemy territory and punch and kick every gun-toting madman I could find until all of them were unconscious, secure in the knowledge that I could hide behind a rock and heal via blood transfusion no matter how many times they shot me. I had 8500 mL of blood; there was no way they could shoot me enough times to make me lose that much. Especially since an awful lot of them were carrying blood bags of their own, which I could take from them and put into my utility pouches as I punched them out.

If Sam is knocked down, there is a chance that things that he is carrying will be knocked off of the stack of things on his back. Sam can carry a lot of things. You've probably seen a picture or two of Sam with a stack of boxes magically attached to his back. That's just how he is. Unlike, say, a Zelda game, where Link just reaches behind his back and summons an item from nowhere, Sam Porter Bridges has to actually carry every single thing on his person in a box. Boxes come in four sizes: S, M, L, and XL.

A size M box is a broad, flat rectangle. Sam can carry four of those in his backpack, and then stack an additional ten on top of them to make himself very tall and awkward. He will easily lose his balance and fall down if he does this, but the option is there. Size L boxes are the size of two size M boxes stacked on top of each other, and XL boxes are the size of three. A size S box is half as wide as a size M box, and only they are small enough to be strapped to Sam's arms and legs. Keeping track of how Sam carries things is important so that he can keep his balance and also keep his weight limit below his maximum.

Everything about Sam's movement and the way that he interacts with the world screams "video game." You press the triggers on your controller to make Sam grab the straps of his backpack and lean in one direction or the other, or grab both at the same time to really make him flex his gigantic and powerful core muscles to stay standing upright under all but the most strenuous of circumstances. You can run and leap great distances by equipping "active skeletons," which are basically metal pants that go on over his other pants that reinforce his joints and give him greater strength, speed, or stability.

The best skeleton is the speed skeleton. It raises his weight limit and also lets him jump so hard that the unborn fetus that he wears on his stomach will laugh with delight. Unfortunately, it's also very easy to jump so far that you wind up taking fall damage, which will upset the little one terribly. One must take care when wearing both a speed skeleton and a small baby: this, I believe, is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

4. Trucking

Everything is built using a ludicrously fast 3D printer. You can build postboxes, power generators, bridges that cross rivers, entire subterranean dwellings for yourself, all with a handheld device and also hundreds of pounds of material that you have to bring along with you. By far the single most visually impressive, and, for a large part of the game, the most useful, thing that you can build is a highway.

You aren't actually building it, of course. You're simply RE-building it. This is a highway that existed in days gone by, before the world was ruined by the titular Death Stranding. Still, if you rebuild enough of the highway, then you have a wide, flat surface which generates enough electricity that the battery power of whatever mode of locomotion you are currently using is not drained so long as you're roughly over the middle of the road. You know, just like in real life: drive down the exact center of the highway and don't worry about any other traffic. There isn't any! Sam is the nation's only driver.

When you first get the option to rebuild highways, you'll only be able to create motorcycles for yourself at your base. However, you can steal a big truck from a group of enemies and drive it around on the highway if you want. Personally, I very much wanted to drive a truck, so that's what I did. Unfortunately, the truck you steal can't be repaired at home. I don't know why! They just don't let you store it in a garage and fix it up.

Later, though, you can request to have your very own trucks made. Better trucks! Way better trucks, with bigger batteries, and enclosed cargo beds so that your cargo isn't exposed to the elements when you go off on a delivery. The satisfaction of gathering the materials needed to rebuild a stretch of highway, then hauling the materials to the auto-paver, then getting in your truck and driving on the highway is incredible.

I am not joking in the slightest when I say that the satisfaction I felt when I first found myself able to drive for five minutes at a time uninterrupted in my big truck full of deliveries was the greatest I have felt in years. It is an amazing feeling. It does, of course, get old eventually. Once you've driven the same road a few dozen times, you know it well enough that there are no more surprises.

Familiarity, Kojima whispers into your ear as you load up a truck with hundreds of pounds of resins and special alloys to be delivered from a city on the Northern border of the US to a city on the Southern border, breeds contempt. This, I believe, is the great lesson that he wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

There are people who mill about, below and near the highway, desperately wanting to steal your cargo for themselves. They cannot. You are driving a big ol' truck at nearly 30 miles an hour. They cannot catch you. They will not try. They will merely yell and grow angry as they see you slowly recede into the distance. Even ghosts, the lingering spirits of the angry dead, will not assault you as you traverse the land in your gigantic metal chariot. "This truck is too powerful," the ghosts must be saying to themselves. "Look at how it effortlessly glides across this road of metal and ceramic." If you stray from the road, your truck may be immediately sucked into the ghost's magical tar and wrenched from your grasp; however, stay on it, and you shall be safe for as long as the road itself remains intact.

Roads deteriorate. Everything does. You can repair the roads with any of the materials used to originally craft it, and repair costs much less than replacement. It's wise to check, regularly, which of your roads need to be repaired, and make special trips up and down the highway for the sole purpose of repairing roads. It's boring, backbreaking work, but it's worth it.

Everything wears down and dies, but, with care, you can keep things running smoothly. Patch the holes, change the parts, all that. So we can say we had a good run. This, I believe, is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

5. Punching MULEs

I've mentioned before that there are people who want to steal your shit as you travel around, delivering the shit from one place to another. Early on, these people are the MULEs, a group whose name is never explained. Nobody ever says what MULE stands for. It could be anything. In truth, it doesn't matter. They are simply a group of people who want to steal your shit. If they steal your shit, they'll put it in their special postboxes, postboxes just for them, because they're addicted to the feeling of delivering shit. It's absurd, it's completely beyond ridiculous, and it's a wonderful gameplay mechanic.

MULEs are a threat, but not a big one. You can walk into a MULE camp in the early game and just punch every single one of them until they stop getting up and then take all of their things, load them into one of their own trucks, and drive off with it. Wait a couple of days for them to recover from their beating and do it again. It's easy and it's fun.

Later, you encounter people with actual guns, and they aren't as easy to beat down. You can still do it, though. You get a bola gun early on. The bola gun is the best gun. One shot with a bola gun will knock down any human in the world. They get tied up and they fall to the ground. If you shoot them in the head. they'll be unconscious. If you don't, then you can just walk up to their prone body and kick them. A single kick will knock them out. Easy.

You get a variety of guns as the game goes on. Pistols. Assault rifles. Shotguns. Grenade launchers. Rocket launchers. Leave those home. You don't need them. Just use a bola gun. The last thing you want to do is kill a man.

You don't have to worry about killing a woman. As far as I can tell, there are no female porters in the entire country, working for Bridges or any other faction. It's a man's world, the world of Death Stranding is. I don't believe that is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart, but there it is, regardless.

Guns come in lethal and non-lethal varieties. All evidence suggests that there is no advantage to a lethal weapon in typical gameplay. Always use the non-lethal one. Truth be told, though, I've never killed a single MULE. I don't know exactly what happens if you do.

Oh, I've read about it. I've read that you have to bring their corpse, packed into a body bag, to an incinerator or a tar pit and dispose of it. Otherwise, their ghost will appear near their body, and if a ghost touches a living person, it triggers an explosion due to the ghost being made of antimatter. This explosion, a voidout, is the thing that reduced the population of the United States down to less than one percent of what it is today, in the real world. You don't want to trigger any voidouts, so you don't want to create any ghosts, so you don't want to kill anybody.

So I simply never did. I shot people with rubber bullets, gas-filled grenades that put them to sleep, stun bombs that zapped them with electricity and knocked them unconscious, and, eventually, realized that none of them were as good as a bola gun. The bola gun is the best gun. The other guns just can't compete!

The other guns can be useful when fighting ghosts, but even then, why use the lethal rounds? Those don't work on ghosts. It's such a strange mechanic. I don't understand it. Maybe on the game's highest difficulties, you need to use more lethal force, but I just never did.

In any case, the gun-toting enemies are terrorists. They are not as interested in your cargo as they are in your life. You can equip armored plates on Sam's arms and legs, which will simply absorb bullets at lower levels and create electromagnetic fields at higher levels to more fully protect him. Fully armored and equipped with a couple of bola guns, Sam is a terrorist-stopping machine. They are no match for this powerful, small man. Norman Reedus might be 5'10", but everybody in the world of Death Stranding is taller than Sam Bridges. I'm pretty sure that the only reason the fetus in the pod that he wears is smaller than him is that the fetus has its legs folded up. I think that if the fetus were to stand up straight, it'd be taller than Sam. You can't prove me wrong about this. The baby never stands up straight next to him.

The problem with the terrorists is that fighting them isn't fun. You have to do it to complete a lot of the game's deliveries. They take a lot of stuff, and a lot of deliveries are "Recoveries" where you have to infiltrate their territory, open their personal postboxes, take their stuff, and bring it back to someone. This invariably means fighting. Fighting isn't hard, but it also isn't interesting. Kojima may have made multiple Metal Gear games, but the stealth action parts of Death Stranding are fucking miserable.

In many ways, the moment-to-moment gameplay of Death Stranding is intentionally unpleasant and difficult. Walking across a big empty field of rocks is made difficult by those rocks. Unlike Breath of the Wild or Assassin's Creed (any of them), Sam does not automatically clamber over difficult terrain if you hold the jump/climb button. He will stumble if you run too quickly over a single rock. His ankle twists realistically and he grunts in pain. With a heavy cargo load, turning one direction while running will cause Sam to lean in the other. You must manually force Sam to stay upright by walking carefully and pulling on his backpack to keep it from tilting. If you walk down a steep slope, Sam may start awkwardly run-falling down it automatically, and all you can do is make him hold his backpack and steer away from any obstacles until he can regain control of his own body's momentum. You never see Link fall on his face because he was accidentally running too fast. Sam is not Link. He is not the Hero of Time, he is not a deadly and powerful Assassin. He is just a porter with a full-body jumpsuit and a job to do. Hills and mountains and forests are not seen as beautiful wonderful vistas to explore and experience, but as obstacle courses to be navigated. Though there are combat scenes, those are not the game's hardest boss fights. The delivery routes are. Conquering them, making your away across a field full of rocks or a desert with criss-crossing ravines or a snowy mountain is every bit as satisfying as defeating a powerful foe in an RPG.

It's a cliche in open world games to say "See that mountain? You get to climb it." Death Stranding gives you a set of tools and says "See that mountain? You HAVE to climb it."

6. Zip-Lines

Eventually, there comes a point where the entire game changes. You get the ability to create zip-lines from Mama, Sam's coworker from Bridges who has a baby. That's her entire personality, right there. Brilliant scientist, one of the main architects of the infrastructure that makes the world work, but do we call her Scientist? Networker? Engineer? Architect? Nah. She's got a kid, though, so let's call her Mama. Fucking Christ.

Anyway, zip-lines change everything. For an extremely small price, you can create a zip-line with a 300-meter range that can send you careening in a straight line to any other zip-line. For a larger price, that is, by hauling materials to your zip-line, you can increase that range to 350 meters.

You might be thinking that with enough zip-lines, you could make traversing the entire map trivial. This is true. The problem is the "enough zip-lines" part. You can only make so many before the game tells you that you can't make any more. This is because zip-lines, like every other structure you can build and upgrade, use up bandwidth on the chiral network, that thing that Mama built. Run out of bandwidth and you can't put any more structures on the network.

This led to me once spending three hours doing nothing but disassembling and reassembling a series of zip-lines in a corner of the game map for the sake of going from seven zip-lines down to five that could cover the same area and allow me to more efficiently deliver cargo to people like the Film Director and the Chiral Artist's Mother. People I'd already delivered enough things to that I would get no more prizes from them. It was a phenomenal expenditure of time, and I don't regret it. I hiked back and forth, fought ghosts, hauled materials, and zipped on lines for miles. It was glorious and pointless, and, when I was done, I had enough bandwidth freed up that I could build two more zip-lines on the west part of the map. So I did.

I wound up disassembling every single structure I'd ever built that wasn't a zip-line so that I could build more zip-lines. By the time I finished the game, I had personally built over a hundred zip-lines: eighty in the central region and twenty-two in the Eastern region. It was a puzzle. There were other zip-lines, ONLINE zip-lines, which had been built by other players and shared with me from their games, and those cost me no bandwidth. I just had to supplement those online zip-lines with zip-lines of my own so that I could take a dozen steps out of one prepper's shelter, connect to a zip-line, and zip my way for five or six minutes halfway across this great land of ours and end up a dozen steps from the door of another prepper's shelter. It might seem like overkill, but a lot of the time-sensitive deliveries basically require you do exactly that.

7. Frostbite For Efficiency

When you rest at a private shelter, Sam Bridges strips off most of his outerwear and sits on a bed in a sleeveless shirt and a pair of baggy pants. His arms and feet are bare. If Sam has been walking around outside without shoes, his feet will be bloody. If they are bloody enough, you can examine his feet and cause him to slowly and carefully remove his torn and bloody toenails. It is painful to watch.

If he has been covered in tar by the angry ghosts of the dead, then he will have tar on his face. If he has been shot many times, his body will be covered in the blood that he has lost. And, as I learned after spending many hours hiking across snowy mountains for no reason other than to place zip-lines so that I could more efficiently deliver cargo, his fingers and toes will be blackened if he spends too much time in the freezing cold.

Sam endures all of this without complaint. In a bit of fourth-wall breaking, Sam will look to you, the player, through the camera, and wink at you. He will point to the shower in his room and mouth the word "shower" until you have him take a shower. If you tell him to, he will strip naked and the camera will show you the nude body of Norman Reedus, perhaps modified slightly to more flatteringly portray his 50-year-old body (but I dunno--I've never seen Norman Reedus naked, so maybe he really looks that good!), to show you all of the sweat and dirt and blood being washed from his body. This scene can be skipped, and probably should be after the first time you see it, but it's there every time nonetheless. There's no real need for it. It's just there as part of the "more is more" philosophy of the game.

If Sam removes his toenails and then showers, thus washing the blood from his feet, you can zoom in on his feet after he is out of the shower and see that his toenails are still missing. It's a minor detail, but I love that kind of thing. Don't worry; his toenails grow back pretty fast. They grow much faster than, say, his hair, which never grows.

As an aside, I've read articles and reviews where people talk about the sexualization of Norman Reedus in this game. The camera pans slowly over his nude body when he showers. He can bathe nude in hot springs across the map, because if there's one thing rural America is known for, it's the hot springs. Even in the final scenes of the game, Sam is dragged naked from the world between the living and the dead so that he can rejoin the living.

I never got that vibe. It's not the same way that the camera lingers on Quiet's breasts or hips in Metal Gear Solid V. It's just a man. A man, exposed and vulnerable like every other man is when he is alone and cleaning his body or soaking in some hot water to relax. Sam phonetically sings a Japanese song from the 60's called "Ii Yu Da Na" when he bathes, which I can't easily translate into English ("The Hot Water Sure Is Nice" would be my best attempt), though Google translate helpfully calls it "It's a Good Hot Water" and "Do a Good Hot Water." He's just a guy enjoying a little soak. He's not a sexual being, and, in fact, we're explicitly told that the world of Death Stranding is becoming an asexual one in response to the new circumstances that people must tolerate.

Sam can also use the toilet two different ways: standing or sitting. These three things, showering, peeing, and pooping, are done so that you can use Sam's body fluids to create grenades that can be thrown at ghosts. The truth, however, is that these grenades are not very useful. After a while, I stopped having Sam use the toilet at all. In my game, Sam spent days without relief, as I only occasionally noticed that he had a full bladder and let him pee somewhere in the great outdoors. His bowels were probably very painfully impacted by the time I finished making the nation whole.

There are advantages to throwing grenades full of Sam's refined poop at ghosts, because of course there are. See, the most powerful weapon you can use is Sam's 1,000 mL of blood. If you have blood bags, though, you can use blood from the bags in your weapons instead, thus saving Sam's personal stash for in case he is injured in battle.

Poop grenades, though? They don't cost blood. They just cost, you know, the grenade. So if you have a bunch of ghosts desperately clawing at Sam and trying to drag him to the ground, you can shake them off for a second, turn around, huck a poop bomb at them, and they all flee in horror. I understand this. I, too, would flee if someone threw a jar of their poop at me and it exploded in a brown cloud of lingering mist. Anyone would. This, I believe, is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

However, it's just so much easier and simpler to use blood grenades! Yes, they cost blood to use, but blood is so amazingly easy to get that the advantages of a poop grenade are extremely minor. Blood grenades are just so cheap and simple. Use blood! Not poop! For fighting ghosts!

This constant use of Sam's body, this constant sacrificing of his health and risking of his life, is all done for the sake of efficiently delivering cargo from one place to another. There's a chubby Asian man who asks you to fetch his stolen PlayStation consoles for him from a group of MULEs. He is ecstatic if you do this thing for him. He is, to be blunt, appropriately grateful. However, there's very little that he can offer you. He doesn't give Sam money. Sam can't spend that money on nice meals back at his private room. He can't give Sam a nice massage or a relaxing bath. There's nothing he can do except offer his sincere thanks, and that's what he does. Sam charges into an encampment of heavily-armed men to bring this dude a bunch of video games, and he does it because that stuff is precious cargo, to be handled with love and care until it arrives safely at its destination. So Sam does it.

It doesn't matter what the cargo is, where it's going, or why. You never find out why! You deliver silverware, you deliver underwear, you deliver fragile cases of wine, time-sensitive boxes of fish, and nobody ever tells you what they do with this stuff. It might as well not have a label on it. It might as well just tell you the weight and any modifiers like "Fragile" or "Time-Sensitive" on it and nothing else. But it doesn't. It says "high-end underwear" or "Russian winter clothes" or "timefall-resistant wood." It's pointless. It's added detail that does nothing. Means nothing. Accomplishes nothing.

Why is the Collector a chubby Asian man? Because Kojima knows that making him a chubby Asian man who is ecstatic to get a PSP from Sam Bridges will make me, the player, feel very happy. I love the Collector. He's one of my favorite characters in the game. He is completely unimportant to the game's plot. You can finish the game without ever meeting him. It's actually quite easy to do, since he lives in a FUCKING RAVINE. But I found him, and I'm happy I found him, and I'm happy that I helped him, and I'm happy that he emailed me later with a copy of his newsletter that he wrote because I made his life better. I did that! I helped this guy, and now he's my friend!

He's played by Hirokazu Hamamura, the former editor of Weekly Famitsu, a gaming magazine. This was, in fact, kind of a minor scandal after the game came out, because Death Stranding got a lot of high reviews after it used the likenesses of people in the gaming journalism world. I don't know much about that! What I do know is that Kojima was good enough friends with this guy that he got him to appear in his game as "Collector," no other name, a dude who asks Sam to risk his safety to fetch him video games, and he's happy to get them and I'm happy to do it because of that and that alone!

I love this dude!

It could just be "CARGO FOR SHELTER 17" that I deliver to SHELTER 17, but it isn't! Everything about the whole thing is meaningless fluff added to the game as decoration, and I love it!

8. Pizza and Monster for Thanksgiving

Nowhere is this clearer than in the series of pizza deliveries that you are asked to do by Peter Englert. Peter's name is a portmanteau of Peter Higgs and François Englert, a couple of dudes of no great importance.

Perhaps, if you look up their names, you will disagree with me, but I ask you this: did you know their names before today? If someone had asked you about them a week ago, would you have known who they were? I suspect most people do not know about them, and thus I say that they are of no great importance.

As for myself, I am of no importance at all.

Peter asks you to bring him pizzas. Five pizzas in all, throughout the game. These pizzas must be kept flat, but the game is quite forgiving about this. I delivered my first pizza to Peter on a truck, and the game didn't mind that I kept driving the truck up and down hills and jumped it over rivers. As long as I never strapped it onto Sam's back vertically, it was fine. Peter was grateful for the pizza, but he didn't come to see me.

At the end of the game, it is revealed that Peter is a pseudonym used by Higgs, one of the main villains. There are a lot of theories about this. Some people think that Higgs is requesting pizzas because he wants to waste Sam's time. Some people point out that, because there are empty pizza boxes in the shelter where you've been delivering the pizzas, that Higgs was sincere in his desire for pizza and merely wrote the elaborate letters of request and thanks as a prank.

Personally, I choose to believe that Higgs likes pizza, and I further choose to believe that, in the end, your rewards for completing all of the pizza deliveries are given because Higgs finally understands Sam a little bit better. The final letter contains not just a request for pizza from the single most inhospitable part of the game's map, but a confession of Peter's true identity. He tells you everything in this final letter. He queued it up to be sent out before your final confrontation with him, to be delivered after either he or Sam was dead. If Sam is the dead man, then whatever. No big loss. The world is doomed, and the pizza doesn't matter. If Higgs is the dead one, and Sam gets the email, then it means that Sam has stopped Higgs from ending humanity. The world can continue on with people in it for a little longer, and, if that's the case, Higgs may as well help Sam out. Here, Sam, says Higgs, before going to face his possible death. If you live through this and I don't, then here are the plans to make guns like mine and a few hundred more points of bandwidth for your chiral network. Make one more zip-line and think of me.

Some people believe that the e-mail is proof that Higgs is still alive. That's stupid, and I won't even entertain the notion long enough to debunk it.

The emails from Peter Englert, and the empty boxes in Higgs' shelter, make the pizza sound and look so fucking delicious, though, that I genuinely wanted to eat some pizza myself. I was simply shown pizza and told about pizza so many times that I wanted to eat it. It's the most basic form of advertising there is, and I am susceptible to it.

Hey, have you heard of this pizza stuff? Tastes pretty good! Hot and delicious! A lovely meal. Eat some and enjoy it.

I would like to enjoy a lovely meal again someday. It's been so many months since I last enjoyed a lovely meal.

When you're out in the field, you can have Sam drink from his canteen to restore some lost stamina. The canteen doesn't contain water, though. Oh, no. That'd be silly. It contains Monster Energy Drink. You stand in some ankle-deep water and your canteen just sucks that water right up, filters it, and turns it into more Monster Energy Drink. You get back to your private room and there'll be five cans of it just sitting there next to Sam's bed. Drink a few of those before you go, and Sam's maximum stamina will be increased for his next trip out into the wilderness. It is good, healthy, and smart to drink several cans of Monster Energy Drink every morning in the world of Death Stranding. One isn't enough. Three is the right amount to start your day.

It made me want some. I've never drank Monster Energy Drink in my life. I don't know how it tastes. I had half a can of Red Bull once, though, and I tried a taste of 5-Hour Energy, and I doubt Monster Energy Drink is much better than either of those.

Now, though, every time I go to the grocery store and I walk past the aisle of non-alcoholic drinks, I see the Monster Energy Drink and I pause. I consider buying some. Then I see that it costs more than $1.50 a can, and I never do. Sorry, Death Stranding. I want Monster Energy Drink, but not enough to spend over $6 on a four-pack of it. Come on. What am I, made of money?

Still, by the time I finished the game, I wanted nothing more for my Thanksgiving dinner than a can of Monster Energy Drink and an entire steaming hot cheese pizza all to myself. It is a meal I will probably never have, but I'll always imagine it fondly when I lie awake at night, alone with my thoughts. Thoughts of enjoying a lovely meal.

9. Throwing Cargo at Higgs

Higgs, as I said before, is one of the game's main villains. He's certainly the most obvious villain. He wears a skull-shaped mask, he summons monsters to fight you, and even murders Sam outright during one late-game cutscene. "Well, we’ll pick this up when you’re done dying," he tells Sam, as he shoots him repeatedly with a machine gun. Sam dies.

This isn't a big problem for Sam, of course, so you just get back up and continue on. You finally confront Higgs in the world between the living and the dead: the Beach. Higgs then gives the greatest speech of his life.

"There’s no repatriation here, no. One of us dies, that’s it. He goes to the other side. Nice, huh? Lucky loser gets to put an end to this rinse-and-repeat bullshit once and for all. So... No BTs, no voidouts, no bullshit. Just a good old-fashioned boss fight. Stick versus rope. Gun versus strand. One more ending before the end... One last game over."

This isn't Higgs breaking the fourth wall. He's simply viewing his fight against Sam in video game terms. In the normal world, Sam has extra lives and continues. Here, in the final fight, he does not. Sam is unarmed. His only weapon is a rope, called a "strand," while Higgs is armed with his machine gun. You have to fight him. You have to beat him.

It's easier than it sounds. The area is littered with lost and destroyed cargo. You can pick those things up and throw them at Higgs as ranged weapons. It's a delight. Higgs will double over in pain if you do, and you can then run around behind him and tie him up with the strand and knock him to the ground and kick him in the ribs over and over again until he teleports away.

Oh, yeah, he can teleport. Did I mention that? I should have. He can teleport. Kick him in the ribs enough times and he will, too. I sure would if I were him. Can't blame him for it.

Eventually, though, he throws away the gun and comes at Sam for a final fist fight. This eventually leads to the complete absurdity of the two men standing waist deep in mud, trading sluggish punches at each other as they both completely run out of steam. It's reminiscent of the final battle between Old Snake and Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 4, and I believe that's on purpose. How could it not be? How could that be accidental?

Goddamn, that was a great boss fight. One of the best. Just two sad old fucks wailing on each other like the broken-down heaps of sagging skin and brittle bones they were. I loved it, by which I mean I cried during it.

I cried when Sam and Higgs fought, too. I cried a lot during Death Stranding.

10. Godzilla Posters

What makes Death Stranding such a tearjerker to me is the sheer unabashed earnestness of it all. Kojima puts his heart on his sleeve, puts all his cards on his table, just lays it all out there. "I like Godzilla," Kojima thinks to himself, and so he puts a memory stick in the game world that you can find that unlocks a small image of a Godzilla poster. It's a small memory stick. It's easy to miss. There's no benefit to finding it. There's no benefit to finding most of the memory sticks. They're all just images of things Kojima likes!

A huge part of the in-game soundtrack is played once, and only at certain points. You're exploring the world, walking from one place to another (or driving, or zip-lining, you know, WHATEVER), and suddenly a song by Low Roar starts playing. Then the name of the song appears on the side of the screen, you know, in case you want to listen to it yourself later.

"I like this song," Kojima is telling you. "Maybe you'll like it, too! Here, let me make it easier for you to listen to it later."

"Alexa," I say out loud, a few minutes later. "Play don't be so serious by low roar."

Alexa plays it. I close my eyes and remember the feeling of carrying my dead mother on my back to an incinerator to burn her cancer-ridden corpse on an evening after speaking with my own mother, who is also dying of cancer.

I don't think that's what Low Roar wanted, but it doesn't matter what they wanted. Kojima did this to me, and I thank him for that.

Sam's dead mother is an awkward piece of cargo. She's a limp 120-pound piece of long floppy stuff in a bag that droops to one side or the other as you walk around with her. Sam will stumble and lose his balance as he carries her to her final resting place. There's some kind of deeper lesson there, I'm sure of it, though I can't really put my finger on it.

Even your beloved mother is just a hunk of rotting meat, in the end. Rotting meat that you must dispose of no matter how many precious memories of her you may have.

Of course, we later find out that there's a distinct possibility that she was not rotting, but that's an odd piece of lore that I don't want to get into.

One of the memory sticks is for a motorcycle inspired by the AMC show "Ride With Norman Reedus." I've never watched the show, but finding that memory stick gives you, the player, the ability to fabricate a "Ride" style motorcycle. If you do, and you should, because it's the best motorcycle in the game, Sam Porter Bridges will yell things like "This bike is so cool it should be on Ride With Norman Reedus!" or "This is so fucking cool, it's like Ride with Norman Reedus is happening right now!"

He drops the name of the show into the game. Is this breaking the fourth wall? I don't really know! Does Sam Porter Bridges, the character, know that he looks exactly like Norman Reedus, down to the tattoo on the back of his hand? Does he watch episodes of "Ride With Norman Reedus" and think to himself, "Man, I sure am lucky that I look exactly like this guy?"

Do other people know it? Did Heartman, the first time he saw Sam Porter Bridges, silently think to himself, "Jesus, this dude looks a lot like Norman Reedus, did he do that on purpose?" and then just keep that thought to himself because that's what you do when you have that kind of thought?

Did he think "Whoa, Deadman looks just like Guillermo del Toro with a head scar?"

You can read an interview with Deadman late in the game called "Human Sacrifices Under London Bridge." He gives an explanation of this idea that perhaps London Bridge was built upon literal human sacrifices, an idea floated to you after you learn that the chiral network in the game uses human sacrifices as its foundation.

"Oh, and have you seen the Shape of Water? It's another movie with a heroine named Eliza. But this Eliza can't speak—she's mute! But it's not about teaching the girl to behave "properly"—it's just a good old-fashioned love story. If you get the chance, you should definitely check it out!"

Deadman is portrayed by Guillermo del Toro, and here he is, promoting a Guillermo del Toro movie.

All of this is because Kojima likes these things and these people. He likes Norman Reedus. He likes Guillermo del Toro. He likes Low Roar and Conan O'Brien and Hirokazu Hamamura and he wants to put them in his game because maybe you'll like them, too! This, I believe, is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

"I like a lot of things," Kojima says, putting his hands on my shoulders and looking into my eyes. "I'm not just the Metal Gear guy. I want to share my love of things and of my friends with you, and I don't care if it feels awkward or silly or weird."

I love you, too, Mr. Kojima. From my heart to yours, thank you for sharing these pieces of your heart with me. Someday, I hope to be half as strong and brave as you.

11. DOOMS

So much in the world of Death Stranding is either vastly overexplained or completely unexplainable, with nothing in between. We learn that MULEs are people who are so addicted to the high that they get from delivering cargo that they have begun stealing cargo from everyone they can in order to get that same high, and we never learn what MULE stands for.

We see characters like Higgs do amazing things, supernatural things, things that blur the boundaries between life and death, space and time, and we are told that it's because they have DOOMS. The word DOOMS is never explained. Is it an acronym? I don't know! Nobody says! It's just a thing that you can have.

Sam has level two DOOMS, and other characters exist who have a higher level. What does that mean? I don't know that, either. Sam can "sense" the presence of angry ghosts, but he can't see them. The fetus strapped to his stomach can, though, so Sam hooks his nervous system up to the fetus's pod and that gives him the ability, too. The fetus, a bridge between the worlds of the living and the dead, is a Bridge Baby, or BB for short. Everyone calls it BB-28, implying that there are at least twenty-seven other BBs in the world, but also BB-28 is permanently stuck at twenty-eight weeks old.

BB is a piece of equipment. It (gender never, ever specified) is just a tool, like Sam's boots or his gloves. It is a useful thing to have with you when you explore the world and want to avoid angry ghosts. It doesn't have a name. It isn't a living child. It isn't, Deadman tells you in no uncertain terms, a baby. It is a BB.

Sam disagrees. He interacts with BB as though it is a real child. His child. He is taking care of it. He talks to it. He rocks it to soothe it when it is scared or upset. He whistles lullabies to it. He can play songs on a harmonica to it. Eventually, he names it Lou. The game never makes a big deal of it. He just starts calling it Lou, and the in-game menus start calling it Lou, too.

Before the game began, Sam and his wife were going to have a daughter named Louise. Deadman incorrectly interprets the records in the archives as Sam being about to have a son named Lou, and confronts Sam with this when he realizes that Sam is calling BB "Lou." "Don’t know what you’re talking about," Sam says. "Didn't happen."

Sam doesn't want to be vulnerable to Deadman. Doesn't want to admit to anything. He calls BB Lou, but not for any reason that he wants to give. He just does it, and "shut the fuck up."

You have to work to get that information about Louise. The game doesn't give it to you. You have to go out of your way for it. Sam doesn't even want to tell you, the player, about it. He'll wink at you in his room and he'll take a dump in front of you if you ask him to, but he won't talk about his dead baby. It's possible that Sam would have been able to connect with BB just as well without having lost Lou earlier. We'll never know.

It's unclear how exactly BB can see the angry ghosts. Other characters with DOOMS exist who can also see them: Higgs is one of them. Another is Fragile, of Fragile Express. Fragile is the de facto head of Fragile Express, her father's shipping company. Their logo is a pair of skeletal hands holding up the word "FRAGILE," with the words "Handled With Love" written below.

It reminds me of an old logo I saw for a local honey company long ago. A small bear had a speech bubble that simply said "I love you." Fragile Express uses "love" in a weird way that I don't fully appreciate or like. I don't need you guys to handle my package with love. I need you to handle it with safety and efficiency. It means as much to me as someone saying that they put "love" in the food they've made. I can't eat that, friendo.

Anyway, Fragile has the ability to teleport, same as Higgs, but she's not as good at it. Fragile is also a living example of someone who has been exposed to timefall, a game mechanic I haven't really explained before. Timefall is rain in the world of Death Stranding, which doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it, so don't. Timefall causes the rapid aging of anything it touches: cargo on Sam's back, for example, rapidly rots and deteriorates. Structures he's built, like bridges or highways, even his vehicles, lose structural integrity and eventually are destroyed by timefall. Sam himself wears a suit that is resistant to timefall, but it's apparently not practical to make other things out of the same stuff as his suit. "Don't question it," Kojima tells me, and I choose not to.

Fragile was forced by Higgs to go into the timefall wearing only a head-covering mask and her underwear, soaking her body from the neck down in the stuff. When we see her remove her gloves, her hands are the hands of an old woman. There appears to be no cure for timefall exposure, though Sam gets a drop of it on the back of one hand in an early cutscene and his hand doesn't stay all fucked up and old for long, so maybe there is? If, like, you were only exposed a little? Or maybe Sam's prematurely aged hand gets better the next time he repatriates like every other injury?

Could Sam, like, chain smoke and binge drink and then repatriate to heal the damage to his lungs and liver? Worth thinking about!

Anyway, Fragile is likely near the end of her life thanks to Higgs. Her head and brain are apparently still young, but it's unclear what the status of the rest of her organs is. Maybe the aging was only skin deep, and her guts and stuff are still basically fine. Maybe some skin grafts would fix her?

This stuff isn't explained, any more than what DOOMS and MULE stand for. These are things that just happen, and it's fine, please accept it and accept that, whatever Fragile's deal is, she's sad about it.

Fragile, whose name has a long "I" so that it rhymes with "smile" or "while," is fond of pointing out that she's not that fragile, a word she pronounces with a short "i" so that its second syllable is pronounced like that of "waggle" or "bottle."

"I'm Fragile," she says, psyching herself up before running out into the timefall with a nuclear bomb in her arms, a bomb that Higgs is forcing her to carry, "but I'm not that fragile."

"I'm Fragile," she says, Higgs on his knees beside her, trapped between worlds, knowing that he is about to die, knowing that dying here will mean dying forever, "but I'm not that fragile."

Fragile is how you fast travel between shelters. She appears in a flash, holding her jagged metal umbrella, a deliberate nod, I am told, to Mary Poppins. A side effect of her teleportation is that her chiral allergy is triggered, and her eyes water. She smiles at Sam with tears staining her cheeks, and she takes his hands. The spikes on her tight suit extend and sharpen, and Sam vanishes.

That's how you fast-travel. You don't open a map and hover a cursor over a waypoint and hold the square button until you see a loading screen. You ask a beautiful woman to manifest before you, smiles and tears on her face, and she sends you where you want to go.

"Isn't this neat?" Kojima asks me, his invisible hand resting on my shoulder as he watches me play his game, his other hand pointing to the beautiful face of Léa Seydoux. "She's pretty, isn't she?"

"Yes," I say to him, as the camera lingers on her warm smile and her kind, tear-filled eyes. I reflect on the fact that nobody will ever look at me the way that she looks at Sam when she appears, holding her umbrella. I wonder what that mo-cap session was like. "She really is."

12. Meeting Heartman

As you go through the game, characters you've only met through holograms and emails and interviews are eventually met in person. One of them is Heartman, the man who dies and is resurrected sixty times a day. He lives in the mountains in a tiny region with a heart-shaped lake. I found the lake before I was supposed to. I waded across it, wondering what the story was. On the other side of the lake was a huge building, and, when I reached it, my HUD helpfully told me that it was Heartman's Lab.

Ah, of course, I thought to myself. Where else would Heartman live in a game this unsubtle?

I continued playing, forging connections between preppers and shelters and myself, until Heartman himself asked me to come to his lab. I'd already been there, but now that I was invited, Heartman was willing to answer the door and speak with Sam in person.

At one point, during the meeting, Heartman's twenty-one minute timer runs out, and he dies. At this point, you, the player, must sit and wait for the three minutes. It sounds terrible, like an agonizing wait, the kind of thing you do in EarthBound to prove to Master Belch's minions that you know the password to his lair.

It isn't. Instead, in first-person mode, you can look around Heartman's lab, examine his statues and sculptures, look at the photos of his dead wife and daughter, see the drawings his daughter made for him, and read descriptions of them all. From his position on the other side of the veil, Heartman gives you Likes for each of these things that you see.

Heartman gives you a lot of Likes during your conversations with him. He is a man who is generous with his Likes. He is a nice man, a helpful man, and a selfish man.

Heartman isn't interested in saving the world, in reconnecting Americans, or in stopping the destruction of humanity. He is only interested in finding his dead wife and child on the Beach, in that world between worlds. He will never find them, and he will never stop looking.

Other preppers, his fellow scientists, resent this about him. An email from the Geologist spells it out plainly: "All he does is head to the Beach in search of his dead family. He doesn’t care what happens to the human race – he told me as much. What a fucking asshole, I thought."

That same email continues on to have the Geologist explain how he came to realize that Heartman was simply doing what he had to do to cope with his own personal problems. Heartman is helping the human race, but he has to help himself, too. He's found a way to do both.

When fulfilling deliveries to Heartman's Lab at certain points in the game, he won't be there to greet you and examine the delivered cargo. Instead, a default message is played. This happens in a few shelters throughout the game, in fact. Peter Englert, due to his desire to hide the fact that he is secretly Higgs, never appears. Another prepper, known as the Elder, will eventually die as you play, and, though he continues to place orders and other people continue to send him things, he will never appear to you after the first time you discover that he is now another angry ghost. There is no way to put him to rest, so I guess that he just keeps sending out emails asking for pills and pacemakers as his corpse decays in his home.

It's strangely frustrating to see the default message play. I want to see Heartman there to tell me he appreciates my work. I want more likes from Heartman. He seems like a nice man to me. He's a middle-aged man with a bit of a gut who wears fingerless gloves and rolls up the sleeves on his suit like he thinks it will make him look cool. It doesn't, and that's why it does. He's the biggest dork in a world full of awkward dorks. The fact that he keeps dying at inopportune moments doesn't help much.

"Sleep is the tricky one," he says, when Sam says that it can't be easy to live the way that he does. This is never elaborated upon. Presumably, Heartman does sleep, but it's left to our imaginations how he does so. One would think that the electric shock he receives to resurrect him would also wake him from his slumber, but perhaps not? Perhaps he lies down at night for eight hours, and he just cycles through twenty deaths and resurrections without stirring?

Despite his sudden introduction, Heartman quickly becomes one of Sam's closest friends. It's only because of his help that you're able to continue to travel West, linking buildings to the chiral network. He's a fellow who says he doesn't care about anyone but himself, but that's simply untrue. He's your friend, through and through, and don't let anyone, him included, tell you otherwise.

13. Hugging Deadman

Deadman, whose real name, Google tells me, is Guillermo del Toro, is the man who may have the most lines in Death Stranding. He is a jolly old fat man who wants very much to be Sam's friend. He risks his job and his life for Sam, for his friendship with Sam. He is the foremost expert on BB, referring to it as "little one" to maintain his distance.

"It’s not easy being me," he tells Sam at one point. "No wife, no children, no friends. And so I sought solace—sought company in the dead. Over time, I made them a part of me—70% of who I am today. But meeting you has opened my eyes. You’re very special, Sam."

That's the emotional core of Deadman. He is a lonely person who forged connections with dead people. Most of his body came from other people. Yet he finds friendship, a real friendship, in Sam. In you, the player. He is your pal, this happy, smiling fat man who worries that, due to not having been born like a normal human from a mother, that he is "a soulless meat puppet."

"No afterlife. No Beach." In a world where there is verifiable, indisputable proof of a soul, Deadman looks at himself and thinks that he doesn't have one. That while other people may get to experience some kind of eternal reward or punishment for their lives, this one life is all he has. He's the only atheist in the room.

Is there room for faith in the world of Death Stranding? There's certainly no need for faith in the idea of a soul: there's scientific proof of them. The world is full of the souls of the dead, those who I have repeatedly referred to as angry ghosts. They aren't actually angry, though. They're scared. They're lonely. They don't want to be here. They want to move on. They grab for Sam because they'll grab for anyone.

If Deadman were to die, would a BT appear near his body after enough time passes? There's only one way to find out, and nobody seems to be in much of a hurry to do it, least of all Deadman himself.

Because Sam has aphenphosmphobia, he is unwilling to touch other people. Deadman, wishing to connect with Sam as a friend, wants to hug Sam and be physically affectionate with him. Sam is unable to reciprocate.

Now I want to talk about this game's fucking bonkers ending.

It's hard to say, exactly, where Death Stranding's "Ending" begins. You go to confront Higgs and rescue a lady on the Beach, the world between worlds, and you do, you fight Higgs, you punch his face over and over in excruciating slo-mo. Then Fragile confronts him and Higgs dies.

You go through multiple lengthy cutscenes before and after you fight Higgs. You have a bit of a puzzle fight against an extinction entity that can, and will, if you fail the puzzle, annihilate all life on the planet Earth. It's an obvious puzzle with the benefit of hindsight, but I'd be lying if I said I figured it out in less than four tries.

The problem is that the game equips you with a gun and automatically brings it up like you need to fire it at something, and part of the solution involves bringing up the quick equip ring to put the gun away. I figured that if the game was forcing Sam to bring the gun up as though he were to fire it, then the solution must involve shooting, and it took me multiple tries to even bring up the equipment ring. Like, the button didn't seem to work at first.

Anyway, I did figure it out after a while, and it was fine.

Also, a lot of people seem pretty upset about a joke about "Princess Beach," but I gotta be real, it didn't bother me all that much. It was fine. Just a dumb joke by someone dealing with a lot of emotional turmoil and coping via silly gag. It's fucking fine.

So! Once almost everything has been said and done, you get to see a scene where Deadman does touch Sam, and Sam doesn't recoil in horror. Deadman, excited, goes in for a hug. Sam is okay with it.

At the end of the scene, Sam goes to leave, but, at the last moment, turns around to initiate a hug of his own with Deadman. It's a giant, goofy, sloppy hug, the clumsiest hug ever captured in media, and it's in that moment that the game makes it clear that Sam loves Deadman just as much as Deadman loves Sam.

They're bros. It's sweet. I was already crying silently to myself as I watched the scenes before this unfold, and seeing these two men slam their bodies together in the ultimate display of friendship and brotherly affection, I smiled the biggest smile of my life, laughing in delight as the tears continued unabated.

It's a ridiculous scene. An absurd moment. It's so far over the top that the top is no longer visible. It's like saying that the sun is over the Earth: at some point, the top is so far away that words like "over" lose their meaning. This, I believe, is the great lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his game Death Stranding.

The CG likenesses of Norman Reedus and Guillermo del Toro hugged each other, and I knew that the hundred hours I'd spent playing Death Stranding had been worthwhile. If I hadn't played for a hundred hours, the scene wouldn't have meant as much. If I hadn't seen Sam Bridges do his lonely walk over the mountains of North America, if I hadn't seen the frostbite on his fingers and the blood on his feet, it wouldn't have meant anything to me. I watched the loneliest man in the world do the loneliest job in the world, and I guided him across miles of barren earth and lush forest and frozen peaks and narrow valleys as he brought trinkets to people who couldn't pay him and fought terrorists who wanted to kill him and sent ghosts to the afterlife by slicing their magical umbilical cords with a pair of handcuffs.

In the end, he hugged a fat old man, and that made everything worth it.

14. A Lullaby From Hannibal

Before Sam hugs Deadman, he has to fight his way over to him. Sam saves the world from destruction by a powerful being known as an extinction entity, but he's still stuck on the West coast. He has to make his way home, and there's no calling Fragile for help this time. Sam has to hoof it. Or, if you're like me, Sam connects to a zip-line and, one arm over his head, flies all the way from one side of the map to the other.

Hey, I put in the time, I'm going to take advantage of the infrastructure I built.

On my way, I picked up the order for the fifth pizza that Peter Englert wanted. I accidentally took one zip-line too many to the East side of the map, and, a pizza on my back, started the next chapter of the game. Whoops.

Well, a quick reload later, I was able to connect Peter's shelter to the chiral network and look at a bunch of empty pizza boxes and get Sam's gross footprints all over the place. Worth it!

It was time to face Clifford Unger for the third time, and, carrying over a dozen blood bags, armored up in level 4 armor plates, and wielding a few replicas of Higgs' own custom assault rifle, I had little difficulty.

Throughout the game, every time Sam leaves his private room, he connects himself to BB's pod, and there's a chance that he'll see a little vision. A flashback, from the perspective of a BB in its pod, of a hospital room. A brain-dead woman kept alive by machines, the BB's stillmother, lays nearby. In walks Mads Mikkelsen, the great Danish actor, the only good Hannibal Lecter himself, and he talks directly to the camera, to you who are playing the role of BB in the flashback. He is your dad. He loves you. He wants you to grow up to be strong and healthy. He wants you to be safe. He promises to take you anywhere you want to go.

He puts on a Santa hat and yells "Ho, ho, ho!" and carries a bag of presents on his back. He sips champagne and appreciatively tells you that it's "Not bad!" He apologizes for coming by late, but he was trying to avoid the rain.

He is dying. You are in his arms. "I will hold you and protect you," sings Hannibal Lecter, directly to me. "So let love warm you 'til the morning." It is sung to the same tune that Sam whistles or plays on his harmonica to soothe little Lou on his chest.

I watch BB's dad die in the flashback. I want him to be my dad. I mourn the loss of Clifford Unger, of Hannibal Lecter, of Mads Mikkelsen. I weep for him like I have not wept for the loss of my own actual relatives.

You meet Clifford in the game, too, like you meet so many other people. Being dead, you meet Clifford on the Beach. He appears and, from a puff of smoke and fire, summons a cigarette. He takes the longest, most sensual drag on that cigarette that I've seen in my life. I haven't smoked in twelve years, and seeing how much Mads Mikkelsen enjoyed that cigarette made me want to go buy a pack.

"Combat Veteran," the game announces via a block of text on one side. Clifford summons an assault rifle. You have to fight him. You have to beat him. As the man I want to be my dad comes at me with a gun, a real-ass gun that will real-ass kill Sam Bridges dead, I have to come at him just as hard. Harder. I have to pump clip after clip of live ammo into his face as a horde of skeletons in army fatigues come at me from all angles.

He wants his BB. He wants your BB. He says every variation on "Give me my BB" you can think of, except for "I want my BB back." I have to assume that the writers were very, very careful not to include that one.

It's a crazy fight. It's insanity. It doesn't fit anything in the rest of the game. Eventually, after you fight him long enough, Cliff is defeated, and retreats to a different area of the Beach.

You do this three times. The third time, he carefully and slowly reaches for baby Lou, and begins to sing the lullaby from the flashback to the pod on Sam's chest. Lou, having heard the song many times from Sam, reacts to it. It's unclear how Clifford feels about this. Does he still think that BB is his unborn child?

The numbers don't work. A BB is only useful in the field for a couple of years at most. Cliff died a lot longer ago than that. BB-28 can't possibly be his BB. Does he know that? Does he figure it out?

Cliff comes to some kind of a realization. He tells Sam that he knows Sam's name. "They told me your name was Sam Porter... but you’re Sam Bridges. My bridge to the future. Sam. You bring people together."

No subtlety.

He gives Sam his dog tags. This is the second time he does this. Cliff, it seems, can keep on summoning copies of his dog tags from the Beach to give away. Handy. He vanishes.

This, it turns out, saves the world. Before facing Clifford Unger on his Beach for the third time, the world is under siege by a huge number of chiral storms. There's a chance that a swarm of BTs, a massive number of ghosts from the other side, will appear in the world, triggering explosions when their antimatter touches matter, annihilating everything.

Clifford, somehow, is behind this. Clifford, somehow, is able to stop it.

15. Incinerating your BB

Clifford wanted his BB to grow up safe and healthy. Sam, as the game continues, wants the same for his BB. Yet, by the end, BB is in dire condition. BB isn't able to connect to its stillmother due to the violent chiral storms. Cliff has inadvertently doomed BB to be unable to survive in its pod. Deadman, shortly before Sam hugs him, tells Sam that BB is to be decommissioned. BB is to be destroyed. Sam is the porter for the job. Sam has to carry BB to the incinerator. Deadman disconnects Sam from the chiral network. Tells Sam that he now has the option to become invisible, should he choose it. Tells Sam that he can try removing BB from the pod.

Sam hugs Deadman and leaves with his dying child in his arms.

The second delivery in the game is Sam delivering his adoptive mother's dead body to be burned in a giant incinerator, and the final delivery is Sam delivering his adoptive child to the same place. If you bring up the first-person camera and press the button to soothe Lou, Sam will simply say "I'm sorry, Lou."

Because Sam is not on the chiral network, there are no zip-lines, no bridges, no motorcycles or trucks. Sam has to walk to the incinerator. Alone with his thoughts, as he was at the start of the game. He's come a long way, and yet, now, he is as alone as he ever was. He's connected to nobody.

"Everything I touch, I lose," he tells Fragile during their final conversation, and he believes it. Now he is about to lose a second child. A second Lou.

Of course, he doesn't go through with it. There's no way he could, right? Instead, the final moments of the game see Sam connecting to the pod for a final flashback. He learns that he, not Lou, was the BB so precious to Clifford Unger. He learns that the new president of the United Cities of America is the man who killed Clifford. Killed Sam's father. He learns that he was meant to be used a human sacrifice to start building the chiral network, and that his death and subsequent resurrection as a premature infant was the catalyst for BTs being able to haunt the world as easily as they do.

It flies in the face of every writing lesson I've ever taken. It's an exposition dump to the ultimate degree. It's terrible writing, and I love it.

"Listen to this," Kojima tells me. "Listen to all of it. Watch all of it. Take it in, and understand what the last hundred hours of this game really meant."

"I will," I say to him as I watch Sam, now out of the flashback, violently rubbing the belly of a premature baby as it lays dying in his comparatively massive hand. "I understand."

Sam watches black particles swirl and gather around Lou's body. These particles suggest that necrosis is taking place. That Lou is about to create a BT, and to become one of those ghosts trapped in this world. Lou is becoming no more, and Sam can do nothing to stop it except beg for it to not happen.

Someone on the other side listens. Lou lives. Sam and Lou leave the incinerator as rain, harmless rain, not timefall, falls on them. A rainbow appears. The credits roll, and, afterwards, we see the hand of Lou, of Louise, Sam says, held in his own.

"Everything will be alright," Kojima tells me, and he takes his hand off of my shoulder and leaves. "If you work hard, and you're kind, and we all pull together."  This time I ain't kidding--I mean it for real: this, I truly believe, is the single greatest lesson that Kojima wished to impart with his literal masterpiece Death Stranding.