#walking simulators

Then it was a half-mile trudge uphill to the nearest coin laundry. All the while I’d be fighting against gravity and the terrain, constantly using my cargo’s shoulder straps to adjust the weight distribution while dodging patches of dog doo and other pedestrians, sometimes veering off the sidewalk into the craggy outlands of South Brooklyn. When I had the energy, sometimes I tried to knock out other errands on the way, turning it into a strategic exercise in route mapping. Pharmacy-laundromat-supermarket-laundromat-home? Or laundromat-supermarket-laundromat-pharmacy-home? Could I squeeze in a café stop? How much could I carry total? Could I offload anything at any point?

As you might imagine from the above description, laundry day was kind of a drag, and I often dreaded it or put it off until even my least flattering pair of pants smelled from overuse. So I’m beside myself as I declare that Death Stranding, a game whose essential offering is to recreate the laundry day experience almost exactly, is one of the best games I’ve ever played. What might have been a disastrously unfun fetchquest buffet has instead proven a supremely engaging and thematically rich work, not to mention one of the most eerily prescient pieces of pop culture I can recall.

The First Walking Simulator

I’ve heard people pejoratively describe Death Stranding as a “walking simulator.” As far as I’ve seen, this is mostly an exclusionary term “gamers” use to describe games they don’t think belong in their hobby—narrative-driven titles like Gone Home and Life Is Strange, as well as more abstract arthouse titles like Bound and ABZÛ, neither of which have much walking.

Bound and ABZÛ, two "walking simulators." 

In one instance, I watched a Twitch streamer use the term in his rationale for why Death Stranding sounded too boring to stream. This was particularly ironic because he was streaming Killer 7 at the time, and had just finished (correctly) explaining to his viewers that Killer 7 was “basically a point-and-click game with walking.” I’m a Killer 7 fan myself, but I feel like Killer 7 fans are actually the perfect audience for Death Stranding, with its genre-hopping tone, lightweight mechanics, overwrought lore, and densely loaded symbology. They even share a number of specific ludonarrative concepts, such as having to clean up after the dead, the use of blood for bullets, and invisible enemies. Suda 51 and Kojima are probably the two most prominent Japanese game auteurs, as well as friends with a history of collaboration.

↑ Not to belabor a side point, but there's some thematic overlap is all.

Even putting all that aside, the so-called “walking simulator” genre essentially is the modern-day "point-and-click with walking." Killer 7 was just a decade early. Death Stranding, meanwhile, doesn't play like those games at all. Those games are essentially on rails, propelled forward solely by their narratives. In Death Stranding, you can shove the narrative completely aside and spend a hundred hours playing with hi-tech toys, hiking through the wilderness, 3D-printing infrastructure, off-roading on an electric motorcycle, placing terrorists in embarrassing positions, snowboarding down mountains, and hunting giant monsters. Death Stranding has more in common with Metal Gear Solid V or Grand Theft Auto than with any game that’s ever been called a walking simulator. The accusation irked me.

But the more time I spent with Death Stranding, the more I had to face the facts: it simulated walking really well. Better than any other game I could think of. Where in most games, topography amounts to little more than a cosmetic feature, in Death Stranding it affects your every step. Any incline steeper than forty-five degrees and you start to lose stamina. A steep decline affects your balance, as does turning. You can manipulate your shoulder straps in real time to slow your exhaustion and maintain equilibrium, but it comes at the cost of movement speed. Sprinting is efficient, but if you have a heavy load, one little rock on the ground could send you tumbling headlong down a mountain. Crossing streams drains stamina quickly and can be dangerous if you wade too deep, but the water also replenishes the canteen you use to restore stamina. Every on-foot trek from point A to point B is an exercise in mindfulness, because every step counts, and every misstep hurts. Virtually no other game offers this level of connection between player and terrain—least of all so-called “walking simulators,” where typically walking is just a side-effect of looking. “Looking simulators” is what those games are. Even games that have inventory systems with weight management elements don’t have real-time cargo shifting. So yes, I suppose Death Stranding is a walking simulator—the only one.

In writing this, I discovered Polygon has an amusing video that arrives at a similar conclusion, but it doesn't get into why simulated walking would make for an enjoyable game. I'll get more into this in Part 2  of this three-part piece, coming very soon!