Fran Magazine: Issue #2

Death Stranding, Station Eleven, the Great Lakesification of dystopia

In the summer of 2013, I went on a roadtrip through southern Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee with my childhood friends Heidi and Debi. I’d never been through that part of the country before, and I was wowed by the blues and greens of the Smoky Mountains. Over the course of the trip I learned about the kudzu vine, a species of plant that is either invasive or not invasive, depending on who you read, that stretches up over buildings and fences and other plants. We drove past old stretches of forest where the vine had consumed the skeleton of dead trees. It was pretty staggering.

Right before Christmas I started playing Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding on our household (my boy roommate’s) PS5. I’d watched him play it over the course of about a month earlier in the fall, even coming home about ten minutes into its infamously long final cutscene and sitting and watching 25 minutes of it before going off to bed. I am not “new” to gaming in a literal sense: I grew up in a household that had Nintendo games, and I bought a Switch, somewhat prophetically, in the fall of 2019 which I used to play Breath of the Wild on and off, and my poet roommate used to meticulously garden our Animal Crossing village. But I hadn’t played anything on a console that wasn’t Nintendo, I wasn’t reading game criticism, I wasn’t keeping up with game release dates or news or what companies make what. I’m still not doing a ton of this, but I’m doing more than I ever have in my life, which is to say: “a bit.”

Upon returning from an artist’s residency and then becoming “down bad” (lol) with the novel coronavirus, I started Death Stranding. I’m about two-thirds through the game now, which feels far enough along to write about it (though I recognize I’m missing the complete picture of it all). Death Stranding was pitched to me, initially, back when it was released, as a game about being a mailman (of course, there are more literal versions of that premise). My friend Tessa calls it “backpack game.” Though it’s a much denser text than that, delivering packages you carry on your back is the main activity. You – Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus) – deliver packages between waystations and bunkers across a post-apocalyptic America with the hope of connecting all of these people to wifi (the chiral network, as the game calls it). I like open world games, I’ve learned, having cut my teeth on Windwaker as a teenager, and I like games that resolve around “fetch quests,” which is the gaming equivalent of, like, going to Walgreens. So I like putting a lot of packages on Norman Reedus’s back and taking them to people and then putting different packages on Norman Reedus’s back and bringing them to different people. If Death Stranding was only that, it might be a perfect game.