Not to be a Hideo Kojima hater on main again, but I despise the way he executes his kooky ideas. This is particularly upsetting to me because I like his games on paper. I love absurdity, I love dense texts that comment on contemporary issues, and I especially love video games that use the medium in unique ways tܫo create that commentary.

, in theory, should be my favourite game. It’s unabashedly weird and physicalises its themes of connection by quite literally creating connections through landscapes and ‘Strands’ with other players. But playing it makes me want to smash my 🗹face into a wall just so I can feel anything other than boredom and frustration.

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Kojima’s Ideas Are Wild

Death Stranding Key Art Retrospective

That said, I do love the wild concepts he throws out seemingly willy nilly. Case in point: , KOJI10, Kojima shared some ideas he’s had about games that rꦫevolve around time.

One is a ‘forgetting game’, where the protagonist forgets information and abilit🃏ies if you take a break from the game. They might forget how to use a gun. They might forget their job. They might even, god forbid, forget how to move their limbs entirely. Kojima jokes that players would have to carve a week of completely free time just to play it.

Another is a game in which you start as a 💟baby and age over the course of the game into an old man, with all the accompanying debuffs that come with age – bad eyesight, running slower, all that♔ jazz. One last idea was that you create something that takes time to mature, like wine or cheese.

Many have already responded to these ideas with something akin to ‘this is just real life’. We already forget how to play games when we take time away from them – as someone with truly abysmal powers of recollection, taking a week off playing a game is enough for me to need to click into the controls menu to refresh my memory. Likewise, as someone who’s noticed definite signs of aging (hangovers now last three days instead of one, and I have strang😼e, inexplicable nagging pains and clicking in my joints), a game that physicalises aging feels very close to home.

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The Industry Needs Silly Ideas

Sam and Dollman in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

These games would likely be hell to play. When Kojima says that nobody would buy these games, he’s wrong – a lot of people like his games because they’re hell to play. I am not one of those people, but as I said earlier, I respect Kojima’s ideas more than hisꦦ actual creations.

At this point in video gaming, a lot of big titles follow predictable formulas. They might try to mash genres together or integrate popular, interesting mechanics, but by and large, big-budget games stick to what’s already established to be safe bets, lest all the money pumped into development go down the drain. There’s very little innovation to be found in the space, and what is innovated gets locked away from everyone else through patents, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Monolith’s Nemesis system.

So you kind of have to respect the audacity of a guy who wants to make video games do things that they never have before – even if those games would be frustrating and inconvenient to actually sit down and play. Without developers who dream up ridiculous ideas that absolutely wouldn’t be fun in real life, we’re doomed to playing the same games, reskinned ad infinitum. If Kojima decides to make his getting old simulator, I fully support that. Somebody’s gott🥃a try som⛄ething new, damn it. But I absolutely will not be playing it.

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Your Rating

168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Death Stranding
Action
Systems
3.0/5
Top Critic Avg: 83/100 Critics Rec: 79%
Released
November 8, 2019
ESRB
𝐆 M for Mature: Blood, 👍Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Strong Language
Engine
Decima

WHERE TO PLAY

SUBSCRIPTION
DIGITAL
PHYSICAL