PlayStation's attempt to summarize the plot of Death Stranding in six minutes is heroic and doomed

Green toy soldiers led by a man in a skull mask

(Image credit: 505 Games)

Remember when Mass Effect 2 launched on the PlayStation 3? Because the original game had been an exclusive, PlayStation owners were thrown a bone in the form of the free Genesis DLC, a story recap that caught them up on the events of the original game in case they didn't own a PC or Xbox to play it on.

Mass Effect: Genesis condensed a 30-hour RPG down to roughly 14 minutes. Sony's attempt to do the same for Death Stranding is a six-minute video recap of a game that's twice as long and like five times as circuitous.

Part of what made me love Death Stranding is how it threw you into a baffling world and then slowly made sense of it, and by the time I got to the end I did feel pretty on-board with its mythology of personalized extinction, suggesting that each time a dominant species gets wiped out is preceded by an overlap between the lands of the living and the dead with one "extinction entity" chosen to be the driver for it. (Though the idea of one real special ammonite becoming aware of this mythic cycle does crack me up).

Sony's video will not give you that same level of insight. It obviously skips over a huge amount of story, reducing Mads Mikkelsen to a cameo and leaving out all the stuff about Bridge Babies being the children of braindead mothers kept on life support to create a living connection with the land of the dead. Which is one of like 20 bugfuck nutso ideas Death Stranding just kind of throws at you in between the bits where you deliver DVD box sets or whatever.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach - The Story So Far | PS5 Games - YouTube

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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