malvasia bianca

Death Stranding 2 is, unsurprisingly, a lot like Death Stranding, and my general feeling is the same. Not like anything else I’ve played, and the formula still works for me. Still not a fan of the combat, but this time they’ve tuned it so that Normal worked for me until the end. I didn’t like the sadism of your main enemy, and the main story wasn’t particularly interesting, but that’s also not why I’m playing the game. (And I did like the cast of characters except for your main enemy.)

So I guess I’ll wonder out loud for a bit about how the game handles travel. Sometimes you’re traveling on foot, sometimes you’re traveling in a small, fast tricycle that can carry a bit of extra stuff (maybe increasing your carrying capacity by a third?), and sometimes you’re traveling in a truck that can carry a vast amount of stuff but that is quite a bit slower than the trike and also more limited in what territory it can traverse. And there’s a ship that you can usually use to get to any of the settlements in the game (after you’ve put the settlement on the net), bringing along your vehicle and items, and there are monorails that you can repair and then use to travel quite quickly between a quite limited set of locations, bringing along a vehicle and a huge amount of cargo. Also, you can repair roads that make on-vehicle traveling easier, and you can build zipline systems that let you go quickly from place to place as long as you’re on foot.

Which makes me wonder: do I think this is actually a good set of options? The trike is definitely a sweet spot: it’s pleasant to drive, it can make it through a lot of terrain, and, as you get used to it (and get used to using the jump button while driving it!), it turns out in fact that there’s really very little you can’t traverse while riding it. And you can pick up items fine while driving it, and you can almost always outrun enemies too, so you don’t have to be too focused on avoiding regions with combat.

But there’s also something to be said for the feel of traveling on foot. It’s much more personal; one of the early people you visit, The Bokka, is another porter who only travels on foot, and, honestly, that’s a good life? And eventually you unlock tools to let you carry more cargo; and then, halfway through the game, you unlock ziplines as well. Ziplines take work to set up, but once you (or other people whose constructs appear in your world) have set up a good network, they’re a much much faster way to get around than the trike, and they’re just fun to take, too.

The other forms of transportation are specialized. You do have a few periods of the game where you’re given missions that force you to carry way too much material to fit in your trike, so you have to use the truck; makes sense from a plot point of view, and from a practical point of view sometimes you want to be able to bring along a lot of construction material or something. But it really is slow, and not in a “meditative way of experiencing the environment” way either because you’re mostly traveling on roads. And, when you first get them, you can’t pick up random packages that you pass near while driving your truck; they do fix that after a bit, though.

Your ship almost doesn’t make sense to put in this list: yes, you could use it to deliver stuff by quickly zipping from place to place, but that would be boring! (And the game penalizes you for that, too.) But the ship has a secondary use: it’s a place where you can stash stuff that you’ve accumulated and might want to access again in the future, but that you don’t need right now. (Whichever of the trike / truck you’re not using; and whenever you get construction materials, you’ll want to put them in the ship’s store so they’ll be available for road building or whatever later.)

And the monorails are even more specialized. Like the roads, you (and the people you share the world with) need to donate construction materials to repair them; once you’ve done that, they give you fast ways to travel between the largest settlements and between those settlements and mines. (And you can bring tons of cargo along, and even a vehicle.) Mines are new to the sequel, they’re a way to get large amounts of construction materials, and of course once you’ve done that, you need to be able to bring the materials to wherever it’s going to be useful.

Having written all that out: I this mines are a reasonable solution to making happy the kind of players who really want to repair everything. And, once you have mines, something like monorails are probably necessary; maybe trucks would be enough, I haven’t thought hard about the tradeoffs, but I bet that there’s enough justification for monorails to exist. Though I also do think some of the roads require too many construction materials, and maybe if they dialed that down, the game would be okay for everybody without mines? And I think the ship is a reasonable solution to the question of what to do about stuff you only need sometimes; and of course it’s heavily integrated into the plot.

I’m much less sure about the big trucks, though. Maybe something like that is necessary (or at least very useful) for the sort of player who really wants to finish every single mission? I’m not that player, so I don’t have great insight to that, but now that I’ve typed that out, I kind of think that’s the real reason trucks exist. Though even given that I’m not sure that they have to be quite so slow: having them be decently fast but only capable of traversing a limited range of terrain naively feels to me like it would be better?

And then there’s walking and the trike: here is where I am genuinely torn. From the time I got the ability to build ziplines until pretty close to the end of the game, I really felt like I was missing out on the enjoyment that comes from them: I remember them being fun to use from the first game, but somehow it always made more sense to just use my trike. (I did build a couple of small zipline segments in that stretch, but those segments turned out not to be useful in practice.) Eventually I did get to one set of missions where setting up ziplines really was a good solution to the navigation, and that turned out to be enough to sate the zipline-craving part of my brain, but still: I think it’s good to find the fun, and I didn’t like having to choose between the form of transportation that’s the most fun most of the time and the form of transportation even that’s more fun as long as you find a place where it’s worth it to do some prep work. I’m not necessarily saying that the game should let me bypass that choice by letting me bring my trike on a zipline, but I’m not not saying that, either…

And then there’s the question of feeding my soul versus finding the fun. Maybe there should be more areas that you can only traverse on foot? Maybe the whole game should be smaller scale? Just from a “how much am I enjoying my time” level, I would have been a little happier if the game were only somewhere around half or two thirds as long as it actually was; shrinking that probably would have meant reducing the number of settlements in the world, but maybe they should have been also been closer together but less accessible?

Anyways, all that aside: what a series. Or maybe I shouldn’t say “all that aside”: it’s a series about package delivery, and how you traverse the map is an important aspect of delivery! And also the vibes of everything are an important part of Death Stranding, and that means that the feel of traversal is important, not just the pragmatics.