With what looks an awful lot like a boss fight, has Death Stranding just shed some of its mystery?
There are few pleasures in life as rich and thrilling as those offered following the spectacle of a Hideo Kojima game as it crawls into the light. The feints! The sleights! The babies, in the case of Death Stranding, sloshing around in those fluey amber sarcophagi! Kojima is a wonderful game designer, but what he really excels at these days is this. The protracted and bizarro reveal, often employing Geoff Keighley - these are strange times - as the platonic ideal of a straight man.
Kojima is in a privileged spot, and he seems to be making the most of it. His games have been bangers generally, so there is a huge audience waiting to see what he'll do next. But they also - and this is where he has a freedom unmatched by many elsewhere - really want him to do something weird and perplexing. I have watched all of Death Stranding so far with the kind of awe you get while watching a master at work. I had a guy around this morning fitting a catflap, and the ease and skill with which he seemed to just know where to cut and where to stop cutting was a strange joy to me. With the dying beach, the bone-clicking, finger-crunching audio, with Norman Reedus and his flesh covered with those Cueva de las Manos palm prints that promise, along with the oil and the fabulous whirligig scanner thing, the numinous convergence of the very old and the very new, well, with all that stuff there is no doubting: Kojima is a guy who knows where to put the catflap. And yet the latest teaser sort of makes me sad. Why? Because after all this shapeless chaos, it looks an awful lot like the start of a boss fight.
There's still a lot I like about it of course, the flappy wet-weather gear, those brilliant scanners mounted near the shoulder, which bring such playful, terrifying life and personality to the Scandi SF trappings. I even like the big Gaudi dog thing that's conjured at the climax of the scene, the way it attends to its paws, the way its whole weight seems to angle it forwards. And I love the way the Man in the Golden Mask removes his mask to reveal...another mask!
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