A few hours into Death Stranding and some positives and negatives. To get the negatives out of the way, this is a little one, but I don’t like the fact you can’t turn the music off. I would enjoy it much better just to have some ambient music playing while I traverse the land, rather than be forced to listen to the (not very good) music. Not a big deal, really. Just a gripe.
Also, this is not a surprising one because we’re dealing with Kojima here who’s basically a very frustrated movie director, but it is cut-scene heavy. At least it has been so far. Again, par for the course with Kojima , and while I like how unique the story and charters are, I can already feel myself wanting to skip them because —
The gameplay is so satisfying! On paper, it sounds so bland and tedious, but it’s really not. Planning out my routes so that I don’t traverse land that’s too inhospitable is super rewarding. The mechanics are quite intuitive and I like how they drip-feed you new things to do while not making it seem overwhelming. This is a game that makes finding a ladder on a particularly harsh piece of terrain exhilarating. The encounters with the BTs are tense and genuinely disconcerting as you try to creep past them, and the game both looks and plays amazingly (I'm playing the Directors Cut version).
It’s just a really rewarding experience so far.