The motion-captured performances are exceptional, even if arch villain Higgs (Troy Baker) makes Jared Leto’s Joker look subtle. The game’s exhilarating finale – long enough to be a game itself – remixes some of MGS’s greatest moments, but this deadens the impact for hardcore Kojima fans. The final act shakes things up, but the gruelling 15-20-hour mid-section is a seemingly endless toil of literal hills and valleys, rather than emotional highs and lows. In the future, a mysterious event known as the Death Stranding has opened a doorway between the living and the dead, leading to grotesque creatures from the afterlife roaming the fallen world marred by a desolate society.

Kojima Productions is celebrating its 7th anniversary," said Kojima in the clip. "I would like to thank everyone for their continued support. In addition to DS2, we are also preparing a completely new game as well as some visual projects. I am hoping to bring you more information on all of these next year." To be clear: Death Stranding’s story is nonsense. Or, I should say: Its script is nonsense. It’s like The Pilgrim’s Progress if every character were high. The cutscenes are dumb and fun, yes, but they are also maudlin. In the traditional sense, Death Stranding is a narrative mess.

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On Sept. 24, 2021, Kojima Productions will release Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. I have been playing it for weeks. This time, I saw the closing credits. Some art will, given time, morph alongside us. Some art will wait calmly, even stubbornly, for us to return with a new perspective. Death Stranding, by my estimation, has done a bit of both. It has sat patiently, confident in its mechanisms and gargantuan in its ideas, but it has also shifted — just a little bit — while we all did our best to grow. So: Is Death Stranding: Director’s Cut worth playing? Absolutely. Especially now. Was Death Stranding also worth playing in 2019? I’d say so. I just wasn’t ready for it yet. On Nov. 8, 2019, after three years of nebulous trailers and confusing gameplay demos, Kojima Productions released Death Stranding, its first project as an independent studio. I played it for 15 hours and didn’t enjoy a single one of them. I played the role of an exhausted man transporting boxes to a bunch of jerks scattered across a decimated U.S.; it was a plodding, preachy, indulgent mess. I promptly deleted it from my PlayStation 4.

Over time, the thrill of acquiring hi-tech items yields to a pang of regret. Other players’ emoji signs litter distribution centre entrances in the quest for cheap likes, and rugged landscapes start to resemble red-light districts. You start to crave undiscovered delivery routes for a reminder of the game’s unspoilt beauty. Thematically, it’s pretty overt: mankind’s attempt to tame nature – through selfishness, or selflessness – is storing up an environmental problem.

Stay connected with other players around the globe. Donate valuable resources to rebuild structures in your world and others’, and offer likes in support of player structures that appear in yours to reward them for their contributions. And so much more! But someone had placed a ladder across the ravine, and I escaped the ambush. That player will never know how much that ladder helped, but that’s beside the point. They made the game that much easier for me. I left a ladder of my own up a steep slope just a few hundred yards ahead — what else could I do?