I have not played Death Stranding. It has been years since I was given a review code for anything, and I sure as heck don’t want to make them part of my business model here. (That is a joke. If big developers are listening, give me your games for free.) I feel like I know Death Stranding though. In meat space, I know several people that do not want to shut up about it: myself included.
The media drip for this videogame has been agonizing. Picture after picture of Hideo Kojima captioned with things like “togetherness” or Mads Mikkelson giving a blowie. There’s enough content in just the marketing of Death Stranding that we have all been playing the game since it was announced.
Review Embargo’s exist to, ideally, force critics and reviewers (an important distinction) to take their time. After all, online content production is a vicious race where clicks are considered. Not allowing the journalist public to immediately rush to their laptops and hammer out half-ideas is often a good thing. The review embargo for Death Stranding, the game we’re all talking about, lifted a few days ago.
I have not played Death Stranding. I know I am going to play it: maybe I have set aside Patreon money just so I can go out and buy it.
An idea is forming in out there in the world. On the positive side, it’s a mark that game criticism still has a long ways to go. After all: there’s not experience that is completely the same to all people across the planet.
Critics aren’t sure if Death Stranding is quote-unquote GOOD. Some reviews say that it is a complete waste of time, a fools gamble. Some are saying that it is “okay” and kind of falls apart at the end. Significantly smaller amounts of people say that the game is sublime, pure, A Thinking Man’s Videogame. All videogames are for thinking people – even the dumb ones.
The public (that’s us) just isn’t sure What to make of the reviews. There’s either complete and total froth, or an insistence that We Knew It Would Be Bad All Along. Hideo Kojima hasn’t really made a game reviewers have been so divisive about – that’s something that no doubt contributes to these feelings.
A problem seems to be that it can’t be marketed as “a minute-by-minute thrill ride.” or “an incredible example of the open-world genre.” A few reviews I’ve read imply that the game focuses on new Verbs for action games that aren’t necessarily tried, tested and true.
Complete and total critical consensus isn’t often an example of something being right as it is something being Wrong. To put it another way, people largely have started to accept that review scores are a broken model. Videogames aren’t more than disposable entertainment if they don’t get treatment other than being products. In the same token, it’s going to be necessary that we start to equally entertain the idea of bad reviews. Auteurs frequently make bad movies in the film industry, and those bad films still get fans and have redeeming qualities. One of the strongest aspects of how Film Criticism works is that critics respond both to the work, and to each other.
Fuck I don’t want to link them because they exhaust me totally, but there are writers using Too Many Fucking Words to describe Death Stranding. These people are maybe their own idea of Roger Ebert in their head, but Ebert was a critic who loved the language of film, not just individual Good Ones. Alternatively, people who do not like these reviews accuse these writers of Trying To Be Like Roger Ebert. Both groups of people here are both terribly off the mark cock-fuckingly wrong. With attention to all of the profanity that came out in this paragraph – if criticism of a work of art is entirely unanimous, be suspicious. Someone is buying reviews or a journalist needs to sell you a product to pay their rent.
Critical division is good, christ. Go read a review of a game you love that says it fucking sucks, awful shit – garbage everything. See if any of it is true afterwards? Happy Halloween.