Death
Stranding

Death Stranding (2019) is an exploration game where you deliver supplies across a vast shattered, post-apocalyptic America while protecting and caring for a baby. It's intentionally slow, sometimes excruciatingly so, which means you carefully consider your actions. This unusual aspect is amplify through its unique physics-based controls that make even a simple task like walking up a hill, challenging. It's a game that looks like an action adventure but hides within it a study of loneliness and landscapes.

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Set in North America with just pockets of civilisation surviving, you play Sam Bridges, a courier delivering essential resources to the various towns and outposts remaining in an attempt to restore some level of communication and normalcy to the world. You brave the hostile, time-warping enemies, bandits and highwaymen while navigating and caring for an unborn child you carry in a strange, womb-like capsule.

Each item you carry adds weight and size to your load, making it more difficult to traverse the hilly, rocky terrain without falling over and potentially losing lots of progress. Enemies are often invisible, sometimes you need to fight them, but other times you need to carefully sneak past them. You can build bridges and roads to help you traverse the terrain, but these do little to change the grindingly slow task of making deliveries on foot.

The result is a stunningly unique game, with a huge, sprawling map, and moody visuals. These are put to work not as a context for warfare or combat like other games, but as a space in which you must traverse, survive and come to terms with. The challenging mechanics, weighty story and unique visuals differentiate it from similar games such as Red Dead Redemption 2.

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Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Death Stranding 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 3 months ago.