As Sam Bridges, your mission is to deliver hope to humanity by connecting the last survivors of a decimated America.

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. But in its ability to tell a story through your actions, Death Stranding is — I might as well admit it — brilliant. It’s languid until it’s terrifying. It conjures up fear before it cleanses with relief. It’s mundane until shit suddenly hits the fan, and it’s all you can do to escape the pouring timefall and make it to the nearest base, with a crowd of holograms erupting into applause — just as my neighbors and I did every night last summer, all but hanging out of our windows as the ER nurse who lives below me returned from a long shift. 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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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. From legendary game creator Hideo Kojima comes a critically acclaimed, genre-defying open world action adventure for PC, starring Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux and Lindsay Wagner.

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. Death Stranding is replete with questions of whether any of this is worth it — the solidarity and togetherness of it all. If catastrophes will keep piling up, and humans will continue to isolate, and communities will continue to fracture, then what’s the point of ever coming together? For all of its preaching, the game doesn’t end with tidy answers. To tie a bow on these questions in a final cutscene would undercut all of the work its gameplay has already done more elegantly than its thousands of words. DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR’S CUT on PC includes HIGH FRAME RATE, PHOTO MODE and ULTRA-WIDE MONITOR SUPPORT. Also includes cross-over content from Valve Corporation’s HALF-LIFE series and CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. Stay connected with players around the globe with the Social Strand System™. 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."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! 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. From legendary game creator Hideo Kojima comes a genre-defying experience, now expanded in this definitive DIRECTOR’S CUT. In DIRECTOR’S CUT, take on the trials of Sam Bridges with advanced combat, more character actions and a competitive ranking system for special player challenges in this definitive DEATH STRANDING experience. Expanded content