Death Stranding is post-pandemic fiction.
A strange thing to say, considering it came out in 2019, before the pandemic really started, and was in development since about 2015. But as was the case with the Metal Gear Solid games, Hideo Kojima has once again shown that science fiction that looks at the present can turn out to be distressingly prophetic.
Its not like the game wasn’t already openly called a response to the Trump campaign and presidency. That much is clear in the game’s primary metaphor of building bridges (instead of walls, as the saying goes). The metaphor is about as subtle as a brick, considering the organization that main character Sam works for is called Bridges. You’re encouraged to creatively use ladders to make bridges across ravines or water. You can even outright build bridges directly, if you have the materials. Connecting America is the goal of the protagonists.
But its also about playing as a service worker in a world that has suffered from a catastrophe that leaves essential workers in even more danger than usual, putting their lives on the line to deliver the supplies and even trinkets that other people need or simply want. The main character isn’t a genetically engineered supersoldier clone of the world’s greatest action hero. He’s a delivery boy.
Some years ago, humanity discovered “The Beach”. The Beach is a sort of afterlife, a purgatory. An alternate reality that serves as a mirror of our own. The beach is a place of the dead, and yet humanity accessed the Beach and used it to power chiral technology. And then an event called the Death Stranding happened, and the rules changed. Dead bodies would go through a process called necrosis, and give rise to “Beached Things”, or BTs. Ghosts.
When these ghosts come in contact with a living person, they create a voidout. An explosion capable of killing hundreds and leveling cities. Corpses need to be burned to prevent necrosis.
Oh, and for whatever reason, the rain is now timefall, which rapidly ages anything it comes into contact with before eventually neutralizing into harmless groundwater. BTs hang out in the timefall.
This is not a hard science fiction. Care and thought has been put into it, as with all the Metal Gear games, but this is more along the lines of Event Horizon and Warhammer 40k using Hell as a way to achieve faster than light travel. Magical realism meets science fiction. Using chiral technology, just about anything can be 3D printed instantly. Information is transported through the Beach instantaneously. Some characters are even capable of teleporting at will by taking a jaunt through their own Beach.
This is the world we find ourselves in. Sam Porter Bridges is a delivery man in the post apocalypse, trying to reconnect America by delivering Amazon packages and turning on people’s internet. All the while traveling through ghost infested territory and rain that speeds up time. The game even pays Sam in Likes, though somehow he gets more respect than actual real world service workers who are paid with never enough money.
Death Stranding is a post-Trump game, but its also a post-pandemic game. And all of this is just from the first few hours. Playing as this delivery worker called upon to go out into the dangerous world of a catastrophe, risking his health and safety just to get other people what they need, its startlingly now for a game that was released before all of this.
You even have people who refuse to connect with others, and instead want to shove everyone away. People who are willing to use terrorist actions and trigger voidouts all to keep humanity from reconnecting. They’d rather keep everyone separate than join together. All the game needs is someone denying BTs are real, or claiming they don’t want to connect to a network with those people.
But its a 40 hour game, so there’s still plenty of time.