Death Stranding 2 Review

Everybody wants something different from a game review. I have decided to deliver exactly that. Here it is. The Death Stranding 2: On The Beach Review of your choosing. Before we begin, let's all just agree from the outset to keep things civil, ok? Let's not be rude to one another. I'm pretty fragile (but not that fragile). [[How would you like your review today?]]

* [[Just give me the score.]] * [[Give me something self-referential like you normally do.]] * [[I only care about gameplay. Talk about that.]] * [[I only care about story. Talk about story.]] * [[Start to Crate.]] * [[Do it like a Letterboxd Review.]] * [[Why can't you just be normal?]]

Would you like a holistic score, or a segmented average? [[Holistic please!]] [[Segmented Average please!]] [[Holistic? Segmented Average? What are you talking about.]]

Oh yeah, you're talking my language! How onanistic do you want it? [[Pretend you're a professional game reviewer.]] [[You do you, boo.]] [[Onanistic?]]

I can do that for you mon ami. [[The Gameplay Only Review of Death Stranding 2]]

A game is more than just its story, but you're in charge, so I guess we can do it. First, though, do you care about spoilers? [[Deeply.]] [[How would you talk about the story of a game while simultaneously worrying about spoilers?]]

I don't know how to answer this. [[Just write a normal review without all this other shit.]]

Holistic scores are those that collect all the feelings of a body of text into one nice round number. Like let's say I wrote three thousand five hundred odd words about a game. How would I take all those words and then distill them into a number while also accounting for the factors I inexplicably left out of the text (probably for flow reasons)? I would whack a holistic score on the end. Then people could ignore all the words and just lose their minds over the number. Segmented Averages are those that assign a number to pre-determined factors like "Graphics, Sound, Gameplay," etc and then they average out those factors to come up with a mathematical average. People over 30 will remember these from magazines. People under 30 will recognise these from those insipid Steam Reviews that purport to have distilled art down to quantifiable measurements that they can score but for some reason the games with more cleavage always seem to score higher anyway? [[Which is better?]] [[What are magazines?]]

Too easy! * Story - 1/10 * Graphics - 10/10 * Gameplay - 5/10 * Music - 8/10 * Acting - 4/10 * User Experience - 3/10 #5.16666666666666666666666666666666666666666666667/10 [[Nice.]] [[That seems low. Why did you include Acting and User Experience?]]

4 [[Out of what?]] [[Nice.]]

Neither is great, but at least the holistic score doesn't pretend like it's objective. There //is// a degree of objectivity in every review, but they are not and cannot be objective measurements. If our categories in our segmented average score can be left up to any sort of interpretation, subjectivity will come into play. For example, if we have a category for 'Story' and I happen to //hate// shallow pseudo-intellectual garbage, I might be inclined to give that segment a '1' out of 10. But some people love shallow pseudo-intellectual garbage. And suddenly the entire segmented average system has fallen to pieces. At least with the holistic score, we can all individually determine that the number doesn't matter anyway. The whole review was written by just some fucking guy, and the score was assigned by just some fucking guy as well, so we probably don't need to send them death threats or anything. So, what's it gonna be? [[Holistic please!]] [[Segmented Average please!]]

In the olden days when we wanted to share information, we'd cut down trees and tattoo our thoughts and feelings into their rendered flesh. Now when we want to fuck the planet we just ask chatgpt what we'd look like if we were in a Studio Ghibli film. This is a dead end, and in the grand tradition of chooseable path stories, that means you died. Just like magazines. Incredibly, as soon as the words chatgpt were read, you were eaten by a grue.

Ahh geez. Do you like Hideo Kojima? [[He is history's greatest creative.]] [[I think he's amazing!]] [[I don't know who that is, what kind of review is this? Just give me the fucking score already.]] [[I think he's dogshit if I'm being honest.]] [[I hate him and I wish someone would put him in his place.]]

You've reached the good ending! Congratulations! I hope you enjoyed your adventure through my review. Remember, the rules of the Chooseable Path Adventure game dictate that you cannot go back and look at any other story threads until either 365 days have passed or you have forgotten what you chose previously. So either wait a year or go get a concussion. Once you've done either of those, click the link below. Until then, you can follow me on Bluesky, check out my other stuff on my website, or just return to The GAP! * <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/joabyjojo.com" target="_blank">@Joabyjojo</a> * <a href="https://joabyjojo.com/" target="_blank">Joabyjojo.com</a> * <a href="https://thegapodcast.com/" target="_blank">The GAPodcast.com</a> * [[It's been a full year and I kept this page open so I could try again!->How would you like your review today?]] * [[I rode my escooter without a helmet and I just now got out of hospital and I found this tab open in my browser. What's going on here?->How would you like your review today?]]

You're so clever for asking! What a game this is! It does everything you could want and more! The decision to use unending tedium as a vessel to link nonsensical unending cutscenes is genius far beyond my mortal comprehension, how could I possibly score it any lower than a #4 out of 4! [[Nice.]]

Oh yeah me too! I think he's great! That's why for me, it's a 4 out of 5! I know you might have been hoping for something higher, but I had to dock it a point to trick all the Hideo Kojima //haters// into reading this review. You know how it is. Anyway, #4 out of 5. [[Nice.]]

Oh, sorry, that's my bad. I asked that question as a joke. Never google who that is. It's not important. Anyway the score is 4/10. [[Can I get some bullet points or something? A score on its own is kinda meaningless?]] [[Nice.]]

That seems disrespectful, but I appreciate your honesty. Now let me be honest with you. I am grading on a 20 point scale. I know it seems insane, but that's how I've always done it and I refuse to change. I'm the captain of the Titanic and I've always worn jodhpurs, I'm not going to change into jean shorts right when the water has started climbing up over my knees. Don't be ridiculous. That's a 4 out of 20 then, or a 20 out of 100. Brutal right? We fucking got Kojima so good. And now everyone will click on this review, because that's the only reason anyone ever gives anything a low score. Or a high score. Or a middle of the road score like 7.1. For clickbait reasons. #4/20 🥦 [[Niiiiiiiiiiice.]]

Pretty nasty. I don't think a single score is gonna have any impact on Kojima-san. But I guess you've been polite, so I'll abide. It's a score out of 100. #4/100 [[Nice.]]

Uh... sure. You sure you don't just want to read the text? That's what all the other words are for, after all. [[No, bullet points and a number. That's how reviews work. Are you new?]]

Right, sorry. My bad. #4/10 #The Good * Staggeringly realistic landscapes. Honestly gorgeous. * I like some of the music. * Lou is a pretty cute baby. * I enjoy driving places when there is zero risk of hurting anyone. #The Bad * The combat AI is terrible. * You can't move unconsious bodies in a "stealth" game? * BTs still pose absolutely zero threat. * The story isn't good. It's convoluted to distract from its inadequacies. * The basic game design still revolves entirely around fetch quests. * The UX is legitimately torturous. * This last bullet is for you, the rude reader for being kind of a dick. You are dead. [[Wait I died?]]

It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal! You were rude! Impolite! I may be just some fucking guy, but I am just some fucking guy with thoughts and feelings, not some opinions machine you can treat with disrespect! So yes, in this game, you die! You lose! Good day, sir! [[Hold up I didn't-]]

I said good day! [[Head out to find Slugworth to get your revenge on the guy who...didn't give you his factory for free? Was that really Grandpa Joe's plan?->How would you like your review today?]]

Oh yeah because I can. I mean theoretically these segments are predetermined, but because I only made them up for this bit I picked categories I thought would work for this particular review. [[You can't do that! That's not how this works! Do it properly dick!]]

That's as proper as it gets. That's segmented averages in action. The segments I picked are no more arbitrary than any others. Graphics? Music? Story? What defines story? Broad plot? Moment-to-moment narrative? Are the graphics amazing because the landscapes are photorealistic? Or are they bad because the characters walking across them look even more out-of-place than usual? I'm sorry, that's just how this system works. [[Well that fucking sucks. You fucking suck.]]

Ahh, it sucks you feel that way, but do you know what sucks even more? This tar pit. It's linked to the beach, which is where you go when you die or something. I dunno. It was explained so many times I went from understanding it to being annoyed by it to wondering if there was something more going on with it. Anyway, your rudeness distracted you for a second and that's when I sprung my trap! My tar trap! And unlike the villains in Death Stranding 2, who can all teleport anywhere at will but all refuse to actually kill anyone for //totally legitimate, not contrived reasons//, I have used my trap to actually kill you. [[Wait I died?]]

To what end? For what purpose? Are you paying me? I don't think so. If I want to make it fun, why can't I? [[Why can't you just do it properly?]]

This is me doing it properly. And also having fun. Go and make a proper choice and you'll see that. [[I did make a choice but you didn't accomodate it.]] [[Okey dokey.]]

I did accomodate it. This is me accomodating it. You can just click away, right? You don't have to follow every thread to the end, right? You have a choice, just don't engage at all. [[That's not a real option though. Once I clicked onto this "review", I engaged. Choosing to stop interacting is not an active choice I can make, it is undoing. It is the antithesis of play. Having begun playing, I must now see it through to the end.]]

<img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-lunchlady.gif"/> [[How would you like your review today?]]

But where do you draw the line on engagement? When are you engaging or not engaging? Does watching a cutscene count as engaging? [[Of course it does.]]

Seconds to Crate. Google it. I don't know why I included this. Gotta include something I guess. [[Nice.]]

What if I skip it? Or walk out of the room? [[Skipping it is definitely engaging. You're pressing a button. Walking out of a room is different I guess... Were you wearing your wireless headphones and still listening?]]

Those questions were hypothetical, I didn't skip any of the cutscenes except for the 100th time Sam took a shower or whatever. [[Ok so what was your point?]]

I actually forget. [[Me too.]]

Oh, well then you should choose a review style! [[Go back to How would you like your review to-]]

Wait, how come you're in control now? [[I'm not sure. At some point I started asking the questions and you started answering them and we switched?]]

Right. I'm not very good at this Twine thing I guess. How do we undo it? [[I think... I think we can't. I think this is my review now.]]

Oh, cool. I'd love to read it now I've finished writing my review. [[Sweet!->How would you like your review today?]]

# ''Death Stranding 2 '' 2025 ⭐ ⭐ If Death Stranding 2 is set in Australia how come there are no Vanessa Amorosi songs? [[🩶 Like review]]

StC: 42 seconds (post initial cutscene) Notes: Walk over the hill and you'll see one. Comments: Joab: The whole game is about crates but it takes a while before you see one. Top tier proof that Hideo Kojima is a genius I guess! <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-crate-scaled-e1752047534444.jpg"/> [[What the hell is StC?]]

Yeah you like that don't you. Wait! Behind you! A grue! [[You Died.]]

Sadly, the grue got you. But Death Stranding 2 teaches us that Death is not the end. I think. It's not that the game was confusing, it's just that the game was so on the nose about everything, I kind of keep overthinking things. [[Nice.]]

I'm not a LLM, you can't just prompt me to do things by asking me to pretend I'm something. [[But you asked?]]

#Death Stranding 2: On The Beach Review by Joab Gilroy I think writing this review might be a mistake. I know why I'm writing it, because I love reviewing games. It's genuinely the only thing I ever wanted to do. It's my dream job. And I had it, I was in it, I lived it for so long. Like many dreams, I was startled awake from this one ages ago, and like many dreams I wonder whether if I close my eyes really tight and hope just the right amount, I might be able to slip back into it without missing a beat. But I don't know why I did this specific review to myself. I hated Death Stranding. And my review of that game (<a href="https://www.player2.net.au/2019/11/death-stranding-jesus-is-kojima/" target="_blank">for the rad folks over at Player2.net.au</a>) still exists. A lot of it works for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. It's the same game, only more so. A few minor tweaks, but no meaningful changes to the skeleton. And sure, that makes Death Stranding 2 an assertion that Death Stranding was an intentional outcome, a doubling down on the design decisions that lead to Death Stranding being adored and hated by so many people. But it doesn't mean much more than that. And six years later, video game reviews are dead. Well, deader. The dream is over. Media illiteracy was a man-made virus deployed upon the world two decades ago, a metacontextual pathogen gestated and unleashed on video games as a testing ground before being deployed worldwide to allow fascist autocrats to take over while the rest of the world was too busy arguing whether unisex toilets should exist. Instead of critical analysis and discussion, youtubers and influencers and pundits and talking heads act as arms dealers for tribalistic battlegrounds where commenters foam-mouthed defend their purchasing habits as if their lives are on the line. The broad apathy of the world towards reviews is not why I think it's a mistake for me to review Death Stranding 2. It's been obvious for a lot longer than the "Death Stranding franchise" that Hideo Kojima doesn't give a fuck what anybody thinks. And reviewing 40 hour games for less than minimum wage has been a quixotic endeavour for a lot longer than the gamergate mind virus poisoned the zeitgeist. I, like Hideo Kojima, do not give a fuck about that (the quixotic endeavour, I am not thrilled about the zeitgeist poisoning and I don't want to speak for Kojima but I doubt he is either.) But I am worried that reviewing Death Stranding 2: On the Beach might be playing into Kojima's hands. Reviewing it is taking the bait. I am a cockroach compared to Hideo Kojima, who hangs out with famous people and sells out Film Festival Panels in English Speaking countries despite refusing to speak the language. And here I am, already in the roach motel, settling in for the long haul. I am worried that interacting at all with Death Stranding 2 (I'm not using its subtitle any more) is the point. Like it? Don't like it? There's no difference from where Kojima is standing. He exists in a post-post-modern world. Where people trade blood, sweat and tears for "Likes", where everything and nothing is true all at once, where only the superficial matters. Hideo Kojima is a genius, and I am a cockroach, and I have borne witness to his brilliance. But he made a bad video game. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap04.jpg"/> ''It takes a village'' "He". Obviously a lot of people made Death Stranding 2. I guess in some way, they all made a bad video game. I don't want to take any of that away from them. But the faults of DS2 lay at Kojima's feet, and that's where he wants them. Hideo Kojima is the Director and Writer and Producer and Game Designer and Casting Director and Music Producer and Story Planner of Death Stranding 2. He's the Studio Founder and Director of Kojima Productions. His name is the first thing that pops up when the game ends. And the second. It shows up many more times after. Who else would you blame for this trainwreck? I realise I haven't even talked about the game yet, but that's by design. That's how Kojima does things too. It takes //time// before you're allowed to interact with Death Stranding 2. When you do interact, you walk forward, thrusting the left thumbstick upwards, over some staggeringly realistic-looking clifftops for five minutes, and then your turn is over. Hideo is playing again. As I sat and watched another cutscene where somebody explained the concept of Timefall to me, I wondered if the game shouldn't be spending this time actually teaching me how to play. I quickly realised it had, because Death Stranding sees you holding up on the left thumbstick to walk over staggeringly realistic looking locations in between minutes and minutes of having stuff you'd already deduced explained to you. Eventually you get a vehicle and you replace holding up on the left thumbstick with holding in the right trigger, but it's essentially the same. Steer around rocks, manage your energy, there's not much more to it. I mean there is. Obviously there is. There's sloppy combat sprinkled here and there, but overall Death Stranding 2 is a series of cutscenes rudely interrupted by some fetch quests(text-colour:white)[=[[.]] <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap18.jpg"/> ''Hostile Witness'' It's far too easy. Mind-numbingly so. I checked twice to see if the game had dropped me down in difficulty for some reason. It hadn't, I was playing on "Normal". Maybe I should have played on "Brutal", but that's not how I review games. The enemy AI is practically non-existent, but that makes sense when you realise 90% of the game world is enemy-less. Why would resources be wasted on such an insignificant portion of the game? The first combat encounter I had involved my being spotted from about 200 metres away and then watching as every bad guy in the region beelined towards me like the Kamikaze guys in Serious Sam. They threw electric javelins at me with eerie accuracy, despite my breaking line of sight. If they didn't have arcing weapons, they funneled one at a time in front of my assault rifle, until they lay in a heap. You could stealth them, but why would you bother? You can't move knocked-out bodies, so painstakingly working your way through an enemy camp quickly comes undone unless your victims happened to have been dispatched in already out-of-the-way locations. Fire your sniper rifle, knock out an enemy, and then watch as the others all come to see what that noise was about. If your enemies aren't human, it's even easier. Most of the BTs (the ghostly enemies that haunt certain zones of the map) can literally be outrun or driven around. The few times they caught me, I simply got back in my truck and drove out of their zone. I fought BTs in Death Stranding 2 literally for the sport (if hunting trapped enfeebled game can be called sport). When I wasn't participating in what qualifies as combat, I was driving packages from one place to another. And god help me, I actually liked it. I found myself driving my little truck across rocky ground, over gorgeous rolling hills and through snowy mountain peaks in a zen state, my mind unfocused, free to wander. It was almost meditative. Every now and then some folk music would play, an acoustic guitar and some basic rhyme schemes not quite shifting me out of my fugue state, the absence of any real threat allowing me to essentially be asleep at the wheel. When Death Stranding 2 is doing this, it's fantastic. I get it. I get what people like about it, because I liked it too. I've played more hours of Elite Dangerous than I have of Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 combined. And most of that was space trucking to fund occasional exploratory missions into deep space. Believe me, I get it. Podcast games, right? Games you can play while you chill out and listen to a podcast? Death Stranding 2 could almost be one, and I'd probably love it. Not as much as Elite Dangerous, because flying through space is infinitely cooler than slowly driving across a geographically inaccurate representation of Australia, but I'd like it a lot more than I do. But Death Stranding 2 isn't a podcast game. You can't just do deliveries. Because before too long, your turn is over again. It's Hideo's turn to play once more. And for every minute you spent collecting crates and shipping them to cameo appearances from Actors and Directors Kojima is a fan of, Hideo gets to spend about half as long playing with his hyper-realistic action figures. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap20.jpg"/> ''Spoiler time!'' Boy does he play in Death Stranding 2. All his favourites are here this time. Hideo Kojima loves cinema, and so Death Stranding 2 is chock full of directors and actors that he's always wanted to work with. It's impossible to tell whether they're good or bad at acting though, as the dialogue is out-of-control terrible. Early on Deadman (played by Jesse Corti in the likeness of Guillermo Del Toro) spends about 15 minutes flat out explaining the story to you. It could have been an email, except it ends with a heartfelt moment of Deadman saying goodbye. Then he kills himself. I think he records it? Everything that's happening is displayed via an Augmented Reality projection that is so "real" even Sam can't tell he's not actually in Deadman's laboratory, but then Deadman walks off into the Beach like his facility layout is 'Oh yeah just go down the hall, past the toilet on your right, past Deadman's lab on your left, and then you'll see The Beach, a physical manifestation of the afterlife.' And that's kind-of how the entire game goes. Someone from the impressive roster of cameos and likenesses and soundalikes will rattle off a few minutes of exposition at you, and then they'll end it with some three sentence revelation that raises new questions, and it gets you interested again. "Sam, this is timefall rain, and timefall rain is rain that makes you older if it touches you and it seems to affect birds but if you see a kangaroo in the rain don't worry about it I guess and when the rain hits the ground it no longer makes anything older because how would we drink anything right? Also nobody wears anything on their faces even when they're riding motorbikes in the rain which would, you might think, through basic physics, cause the rain to hit them in the face. But don't worry about it, what's important to know is that the rain makes people age quicker and it's defeated by clothing and kangaroos are immune or something. Anyway, this woman can control the rain and her name is Rainy and yeah, I realise that's a bit much, but also she can make rain that makes people younger." And the cutscene ends, and you're sitting there going "What!? What the fuck?" and it's very easy to treat this sort of thing as depth, right? It must be deep, because why else would there be questions? It's not though. Because eventually you'll get another cutscene that will explicitly explain Rainy's deal, and then it will raise a couple of new questions and it will feel like progress, like you learned something, but it was just sort of… dumped on you. Which some people like, I guess, but it's not for me. And you can tell it's not for all the performers as well, as some of them deliver their lines like somewhere off screen there's a director saying "I understand your concerns, but why don't you just try the line as written once and then we can talk about it at lunch", but there's never any discussion at lunch. They just use that one take. Not all of the performances are bad, mind you. I think Norman Reedus is great. Most of the time he plays it like the perfect player-character, a representation of me. Early, when a robot ninja shows up and kills all the robots threatening Sam (Reedus' character) and then disappears in a puff of dust, Norman says "What was his deal?" as if an eight foot tall teleporting samurai robot is confusing, but not in a monumental world-shifting way, just as a regular kind of oddity. The sort of thing where if you saw it on the street you'd glance over and raise an eyebrow but you wouldn't break out your phone and start recording. Troy Baker's Higgs is incredible too, but that's not really a surprise at this point. That man has run the gamut of dialogue quality and he always nails it. The end is when it really falls apart, regardless of how good any performances are. I already said spoiler warning, but let me drop it on you again. I am going to explicitly talk through how the game ends right now. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap12.jpg"/> ''I'm not kidding, spoiler time!'' After defeating Higgs for the umpteenth time, despite his apparent omnipotence, it is revealed to you by The President that APAS (the operating system behind APAC, the company you work for) is actually an AGI (I guess?) that has decided to connect all of humanity up so that it will stagnate, which is the precursor to extinction. This will allow a new primary lifeform to take over the planet (APAS itself). The President was actually a projection by APAS to get you to do things. Higgs, the seemingly omnipotent guitar-wielding demon creature who has been tormenting you all game, was a tool of APAS, designed to cause the conflict APAS determined was necessary to get Sam to connect Australia up to the network. Why would the AGI tell Sam all of this before he finished connecting up the entire rest of the world? Don't worry about it. Then, right as APAS has finished revealing its master plan to you, Die-Hardman—the former President who went... somewhere else... during the events of Death Stranding 2—reveals that he knew what APAS was up to the entire time! And he has been hiding out in a secret compartment on the ship you've been cruising around on the whole time! And he has dismantled APAS' ability to trap humanity! So everything is cool. Why didn't he do it earlier? Why wait until now to reveal all of this? Don't worry about it. Then Higgs reveals that he knew about APAS' plans, and about Die-Hardman's counter-plans, but he had his own counter-counter-counterplans and he was actually in control the entire time. Another twist! And now Higgs kidnaps Tomorrow to force the Last Stranding, which is just humanity's extinction but cooler. Oh, and he killed your baby, and he did it to punish your mother who was the President of the United States until you carried her corpse to an incinerator and Die-Hardman became the President. Who is Tomorrow? Well she's your daughter but you don't know that but she's actually that baby Higgs killed at the start of the game but you did know that she was your daughter but you also didn't know that you had a daughter because you thought your wife banged another guy and it was really sweet when you loved Lou like she was your own despite your wife's infidelity but don't worry it was your daughter the whole time and she's grown up now and she's played by Elle Fanning and don't worry about it. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap19.jpg"/> I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Joab you're skewing all of this to make it seem worse than it is." But I promise you I'm not. I didn't intentionally describe anything incorrectly. But I might have gotten some details wrong, and I'll tell you why. Because after the fourth or fifth shocking twist delivered straight down the barrel at me in the space of 15 minutes, the narrative whiplash made me numb. No, not numb. Incorporeal. It was an out-of-body experience. I was no longer watching this game explain its next wild twist to me four minutes after revealing the last two. I was watching myself watching all of this unfold. And I was able to reflect. Reflect on how none of anything I'd done had mattered. I'd never really been in control. Sam hadn't been in control of anything. He'd been Would You Kindly'd every step of the way, if the Would You Kindly trigger phrase was hypnotic suggestion and more "Sam will just do whatever he is told". He just… does what he's asked to do. The entire way. He never interrogates it. He crosses through a fucking gate between life and death to travel from Mexico to Australia like he's commuting to work. And when he's in Australia, he's supposed to connect it all to a single network? It's taken the NBN Co thousands of staff and billions of dollarydoos and nearly two decades and they still haven't connected all of Australia. And Sam is just like "well okey dokey anything else you want me to carry along the way? Maybe I can moonlight as a pizza delivery guy as well?" Maybe that's the secret. I know the whole 'we only use 10% of our brain' thing is a myth, but maybe in Sam's case it's for real. Maybe it's like that episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Reese tells Malcolm the secret to happiness is "Minty mints are your breaths' friend" and Malcolm tries it out and he's actually happy for once. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap03.jpg"/> Maybe I should just shut my brain off and appreciate Death Stranding 2 for what it is. A fetch quest-a-thon, sure, but a very good-looking fetch-quest-a-thon. And at the end of the day, isn't that what we all want? Something that looks good? Wow, I called it early on when I said this was a mistake, hey. 3000-ish words to come to the conclusion that maybe I should be more superficial? And for what? If people read this, I'm playing right into Kojima's hands. I perpetuate the myth of the messianic Kojima-san, a nay-saying pharisee for his disciples to cast down. If people don't read it… actually I'm fine with that outcome. It's par for the course at this point. If I really wanted to get my message across, I'd have made a game with fuck all gameplay and too many words. [[Wow. I regret letting you do you, boo.]]

It's a wanky way to say wanky. I think it sets expectations nicely. If I said "how wanky do you want it?" you might think "hmmm, he might not be that big a wanker." But now you're thinking 'jesus christ, what a wanker'. So there you go. [[Pretend you're a professional game reviewer.]] [[You do you, boo.]]

Fair call. Anyway, I //am// a professional game reviewer, so I don't need to pretend. My self-referential meta horseshit is the only option. [[So just the illusion of choice then?]] [[Could you pretend to be a better professional game reviewer then?]]

Welcome to the real world meat sack. [[Seems kinda lame though.]]

That's a pretty good burn but now, I couldn't. There are no better professional game reviewers than me. [[Well you got me there->How would you like your review today?]]

Oh so it's ok when Kojima straps you in and forces you to sit through a hyper-linear narrative farce but when I do it it's lame? [[Aren't you all over this review calling the narrative of Death Stranding 2 lame?]]

Yeah, but I didn't say I could do better. I can pick that I don't like things without needing to know how to fix them, or how to do them better. That's such a fascile rebuttal to criticism. "Oh, why don't you do better?" Horseshit. I can see the faults with the Lakers offense without needing to //be// a Tall Guy Who Can Block Things And Provide Spacing. If I called myself a fucking Video Game Coach, would my criticism have more merit? Get outta here. [[It feels like you're trying to change the subject.]]

But that's where you're wrong. The subject was always this, I just tricked you on how we arrived at it. I was always going to talk about how good critique does not need to provide solutions, the same way that Hideo Kojima was always going to make you redo the boss fight from the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 but now with guitars which makes it way cooler. [[I feel like I've been manipulated.]]

That's what I was going for baby! [[Nice.]]

Is asking me to talk about the story without talking spoilers actually just a set of handcuffs because you don't want me to talk shit about your favourite game? [[Honestly, yes.]] [[No, I hate spoilers. I haven't played this game but I want you to critically analyse its story without spoiling anything just in case one day I do play it.]]

I dunno it's a big deal to people. They read a review and they say they want to know what you think, but just like a portion of it. I guess they just want vibes. [[Not me, I want the whole shebang!]]

Thank you for being honest. I'm afraid it's not going to help though. No handcuffs can hold the magician named Joab. [[The Spoiler-Free Story Review]]

Very demanding. I feel like you owe me a beer. Nevertheless, here is your review. [[The Spoiler-Free Story Review]]

The weed number! Huge coincidence, but here we are! You just smoked a fat J and arrived in stoner heaven! [[Wait, heaven? Did I die?]]

Yeah. It wasn't from the weed, weed doesn't kill. But while you were giggling at the funny weed number a grue snuck up on you. [[Nice.]] [[You Died.]]

#Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Review: Story-Only Edition: Spoiler-Free Edition By Joab Gilroy Never have so many words been used to say so little. Well, outside of one of my reviews, hey? HEY!? Death Stranding 2's story is… not great. Told entirely through supertext—that is, the opposite of subtext—there is never a plot point left unexplained for the viewer. And yet people will absolutely come away from the game confused. And somehow this is a point of pride among fans of the game. It's like if a swimming teacher carved a notch into his togs for each kid that drowned under his watch. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-redacted.jpg"/> The problem is that Death Stranding 2 overwhelms you with information, far more than is necessary or useful, to the point where you're drowning beneath the flow of it. The way it works is simple. It explains something to you. Let's say "Timefall", the rain that makes people age. Because despite explaining how Timefall works 100 times in the first game, Death Stranding 2 actually kicks off with an explanation of it again. When it's done explaining Timefall to you, it explains some new made up thing. The ███ █████████, for example, a ███ you use in Death Stranding 2 to traverse the Tar. Both Timefall and the ███ █████████ are weird, both incongruent with how you understand reality, so your brain has to process this information to determine whether it's important or not. It's relevant, because it's in the game, but its importance is up in the air. But the trick here is in what it doesn't explain. It's like Penn & Teller doing a magic trick with a perspex stand. You can see what they're doing. You can see the ball, you can see how Teller is palming it, how it never actually leaves his person while Penn does his patter. They're literally telling you everything you need to know about why the little red ball is able to disappear, or multiply, or disappear and multiply. And then Teller drops a bowling ball from out of nowhere, and they don't mention it at all. I did it above. What the fuck is Tar? Death Stranding 2 tells you over and over what Timefall is, and what the ███ █████████ is, and what a Beach is, and all this other stuff, but there's a whole heap of stuff it just never touches. If Sam didn't just sit mutely while being lectured, if he asked a single digit percentage of the questions I'd like to ask, I really think the mood on the ███ █████████ would be different. "Sam, Timefall is rain that makes things old. If it touches your skin, it ages you quickly, a fact that is self-evident based on how it interacts with the birds that suicidally fly into it constantly. The thing about Timefall is-what? What's "Tar"? It's black goop that looks like Tar. No, I won't explain any further. Are you dense? Shut the fuck up and listen. Anyway, the ███ █████████ is a ship that traverses the Tar currents to travel anywhere in an instant. By using the ███ █████████, we can-what? Yes, Tar has currents. I'm not going to get into this with you Sam. I can't explain every little thing to you. Some things you're just going to have to intuit. Please stop interrupting. Anyway, as I was saying by using the ███ █████████, ██████ can take us to anywhere we want in the world instantaneously. That way-NO! NO SAM! SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE ████████████! YOU DON'T GET TO ASK ABOUT THE ████████████! BRING IT UP AGAIN AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!" <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-redacted.jpg"/> If you're into it, it leaves you in a constant state of wonder. You're always learning something, you're being gish galloped with new information even, but at the same time there's always something you don't know. And it's always weird. Symbolic, but in a really shallow way. Or cool, but in a really shallow way. The bad guy has ████████████—an ████████████, get it? Tarman has a ████████████ that can ██. There are multiple boss fights involving ██████, but it's kind of using the already existing APAC infrastructure. It's stuff that looks cool in a trailer, or a screenshot, but that's as far as it goes. It's cool for the sake of being cool, or weird for the sake of being weird. And knowing that Kojima is obsessed with David Lynch, I think it makes sense. Hideo Kojima has been called gaming's David Lynch more than once, and superficially it makes sense. Both are divisive, and when you ask people why they'll often point out how complicated the stories are from both artists. On the surface, both deliver stories filled with ambiguous, if not downright obtuse elements that confound viewers for years, sometimes decades. Fans of each go crazy trying to work out the hidden meanings behind everything. They aren't the same, though. When in charge, Lynch's choices were made with a great deal of purpose and intent. And to do that requires a staggering amount of confidence—that's what made David Lynch so fucking cool. Kojima, however, will happily throw something in solely because he thinks it's cool. Branded sunglasses, Directors he wants to be friends with, Actors he wants to make-believe direct, Hideo Kojima is like a bower bird when it comes to cool shit. David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan worked together for three decades. Kojima dropped David Hayter the instant Keifer Sutherland's agent started taking calls. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-redacted.jpg"/> That's the thing that Death Stranding 2 really highlights to me, I think. Hideo Kojima wants to come across as aloof and cool and above it all, but he so desperately wants to be liked. I mean, the game is literally littered with Likes. Signs you can like, signs you like just by traversing near them, roads you can press a button to like and cool bands who tell you they like your work, and the likenesses but not actual voices of real life directors who tell you they're proud of what you've achieved. And you know what? In some ways that's really endearing. It's honest, I think, it's up-front. It's not like he hid it. You can't walk three steps out of a bunker you just connected to the Chiral Network without being confronted by 50 thumbs up icons from people who all feel the same way. Likes don't do anything, but people seem to really fucking want them. Why not? Everyone wants to be liked, right? But I don't like Death Stranding 2. I don't like the story. I tried really hard to get on board. I tried to push down the parts of my brain that can't stand endless exposition, to just accept the game for what it is. Even when I do that, though, I don't think it's well written. The end of the game is a rapid-fire machine-gun spray of twists and reveals that wind up being meaningless because they're paced so poorly. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I think maybe those cutscenes should have been longer. All the coolest bits are from other games. ███ ███, Sam's ██ ███████, constantly dresses up like █████ █████. A ████ █████ appears and disappears to save Sam at multiple points in the story. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-redacted.jpg"/> Actually, that reminds me. The cutscenes aren't even consistent with the options I made in the game. When the ████ █████ cutscene happened, I had actually driven around the entire encounter that necessitated its arrival, so Death Stranding 2 warped me backwards. Multiple times throughout the game, cutscenes fail to reflect the cosmetic changes I'd made to Sam—although at many other times, those visual changes were present. Anyway, you replay the ████████ █████ from █████, and the ████ █████ █████ from █████, but both times there are █████ involved to make them cooler. When someone else pays tribute to your work, that's homage. When you redo your old stuff, that's a sign that you might be out of ideas. Any goodwill I had went away when the game revealed that ███ (Sam's ██, who is ██████ but ███ ██████ at the beginning of the game) was not in fact Sam's ██████ █████████ ███, but Sam's. Why? Why not go in. David Lynch would have called the player a ████, I bet you all the cherry pie and coffee you can handle. But Death Stranding 2 chickens out. And chickening out just isn't cool. [[Wow. That's basically unintelligible. Why would you do it like this?]]

I appreciate that! I appreciate you. Here you go! [[The Spoilerriffic Story Review of Death Stranding 2]]

#Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Review: Story-Only Edition By Joab Gilroy Never have so many words been used to say so little. Well, outside of one of my reviews, hey? HEY!? Death Stranding 2's story is… not great. Told entirely through supertext—that is, the opposite of subtext—there is never a plot point left unexplained for the viewer. And yet people will absolutely come away from the game confused. And somehow this is a point of pride among fans of the game. It's like if a swimming teacher carved a notch into his togs for each kid that drowned under his watch. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap03.jpg"/> The problem is that Death Stranding 2 overwhelms you with information, far more than is necessary or useful, to the point where you're drowning beneath the flow of it. The way it works is simple. It explains something to you. Let's say "Timefall", the rain that makes people age. Because despite explaining how Timefall works 100 times in the first game, Death Stranding 2 actually kicks off with an explanation of it again. When it's done explaining Timefall to you, it explains some new made up thing. The DHV Magellan, for example, a ship you use in Death Stranding 2 to traverse the Tar. Both Timefall and the DHV Magellan are weird, both incongruent with how you understand reality, so your brain has to process this information to determine whether it's important or not. It's relevant, because it's in the game, but its importance is up in the air. But the trick here is in what it doesn't explain. It's like Penn & Teller doing a magic trick with a perspex stand. You can see what they're doing. You can see the ball, you can see how Teller is palming it, how it never actually leaves his person while Penn does his patter. They're literally telling you everything you need to know about why the little red ball is able to disappear, or multiply, or disappear and multiply. And then Teller drops a bowling ball from out of nowhere, and they don't mention it at all. I did it above. What the fuck is Tar? Death Stranding 2 tells you over and over what Timefall is, and what the DHV Magellan is, and what a Beach is, and all this other stuff, but there's a whole heap of stuff it just never touches. If Sam didn't just sit mutely while being lectured, if he asked a single digit percentage of the questions I'd like to ask, I really think the mood on the Magellan would be different. "Sam, Timefall is rain that makes things old. If it touches your skin, it ages you quickly, a fact that is self-evident based on how it interacts with the birds that suicidally fly into it constantly. The thing about Timefall is-what? What's "Tar"? It's black goop that looks like Tar. No, I won't explain any further. Are you dense? Shut the fuck up and listen. Anyway, the DHV Magellan is a ship that traverses the Tar currents to travel anywhere in an instant. By using the Magellan, we can-what? Yes, Tar has currents. I'm not going to get into this with you Sam. I can't explain every little thing to you. Some things you're just going to have to intuit. Please stop interrupting. Anyway, as I was saying by using the DHV Magellan, Tarman can take us to anywhere we want in the world instantaneously. That way-NO! NO SAM! SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE CAT MADE OF TAR! YOU DON'T GET TO ASK ABOUT THE CAT MADE OF TAR! BRING IT UP AGAIN AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!" <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap02.jpg"/> If you're into it, it leaves you with a constant state of wonder. You're always learning something, you're being gish galloped with new information even, but at the same time there's something you don't know. And it's always weird. Symbolic, but in a really shallow way. Or cool, but in a really shallow way. The bad guy has a guitar that shoots lightning—an electric guitar, get it? Tarman has a little cat made of Tar that can fly. There are multiple boss fights involving motorbikes, but it's kind of using the already existing APAC infrastructure. It's stuff that looks cool in a trailer, or a screenshot, but that's as far as it goes. It's cool for the sake of being cool, or weird for the sake of being weird. And knowing that Kojima is obsessed with David Lynch, I think it makes sense. Hideo Kojima has been called gaming's David Lynch more than once, and superficially it makes sense. Both are divisive, and when you ask people why they'll often point out how complicated the stories are from both artists. On the surface, both deliver stories filled with ambiguous, if not downright obtuse elements that confound viewers for years, sometimes decades. Fans of each go crazy trying to work out the hidden meanings behind everything. They aren't the same, though. When in charge, Lynch's choices were made with a great deal of purpose and intent. And to do that requires a staggering amount of confidence—that's what made David Lynch so fucking cool. Kojima, however, will happily throw something in solely because he thinks it's cool. Branded sunglasses, Directors he wants to be friends with, Actors he wants to make-believe direct, Hideo Kojima is like a bower bird when it comes to cool shit. David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan worked together for three decades. Kojima dropped David Hayter the instant Keifer Sutherland's agent started taking calls. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap17.jpg"/> That's the thing that Death Stranding 2 really highlights to me, I think. Hideo Kojima wants to come across as aloof and cool and above it all, but he so desperately wants to be liked. I mean, the game is literally littered with Likes. Signs you can like, signs you like just by traversing near them, roads you can press a button to like and cool bands who tell you they like your work, and the likenesses but not actual voices of real life directors who tell you they're proud of what you've achieved. And you know what? In some ways that's really endearing. It's honest, I think, it's up-front. It's not like he hid it. You can't walk three steps out of a bunker you just connected to the Chiral Network without being confronted by 50 thumbs up icons from people who all feel the same way. Likes don't do anything, but people seem to really fucking want them. Why not? Everyone wants to be liked, right? But I don't like Death Stranding 2. I don't like the story. I tried really hard to get on board. I tried to push down the parts of my brain that can't stand endless exposition, to just accept the game for what it is. Even when I do that, though, I don't think it's well written. The end of the game is a rapid-fire machine-gun spray of twists and reveals that wind up being meaningless because they're paced so poorly. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I think maybe those cutscenes should have been longer. All the coolest bits are from other games. Neil Vana, Sam's wife's boyfriend, constantly dresses up like Solid Snake. A cyborg ninja appears and disappears to save Sam at multiple points in the story. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap01.jpg"/> Actually, that reminds me. The cutscenes aren't even consistent with the options I made in the game. When the cyborg ninja cutscene happened, I had actually driven around the entire encounter that necessitated its arrival, so Death Stranding 2 warped me backwards. Multiple times throughout the game, cutscenes fail to reflect the cosmetic changes I'd made to Sam—although at many other times, those visual changes were present. Anyway, you replay the Microwave scene from MGS4, and the final boss fight from MGS2, but both times there are guitars involved to make them cooler. When someone else pays tribute to your work, that's homage. When you redo your old stuff, that's a sign that you might be out of ideas. Any goodwill I had went away when the game revealed that Lou (Sam's BB, who is killed but not killed at the beginning of the game) was not in fact Sam's wife's boyfriend's child, but Sam's. Why? Why not go in. David Lynch would have called the player a cuck, I bet you all the cherry pie and coffee you can handle. But Death Stranding 2 chickens out. And chickening out just isn't cool. [[Damn. Anything you wanted to add but didn't get to?]]

#Death Stranding 2: On the Beach: The Gameplay-only Review By Joab Gilroy It took me 40 hours to finish Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. By the end, I hated it. But damn if I don't think there might be a 15 hour long game in there that I'd enjoy. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap13.jpg"/> I hated Death Stranding, and if you're aware of this you're probably thinking I probably started Death Stranding 2 hating it as well. That is probably true, at least a little. I'm a human. I do not exist in a bubble. I came into Death Stranding 2 with preconceived ideas of what I would be experiencing. But I want to tell you I genuinely, honestly tried to put those biases aside. As best I could, anyway. I tried so hard to play Death Stranding 2 and enjoy it on its own merits. It just wouldn't stop getting in its own way. The basic overview of Death Stranding 2 is that it's a fetch-quest-a-thon. You get a package in one location and you take it to another. Or you're asked to retrieve a package from one location so you can take it to another. Fetch this, fetch that, that's the whole game. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap14.jpg"/> To do this, you walk the main character from one location to another. And while it's not QWOP, walking in Death Stranding 2 is no mindless task. If you've ever been hiking, ever gotten off the beaten path, you know how this goes. It's important that you take care in where you place your feet, in how you take your next step, because making a mistake can cost you very, very dearly. Hell, growing up in Australia and having seen more than my fair share of actually deadly snakes, you need to take care in where you place your feet even on the beaten path. It's not a terrible idea for a game. There's an entire genre of transporting games. Euro and American Truck Simulators, Elite Dangerous, sometimes what you want to do is carry things from one location to another. And there are traversal games too, like Journey, where getting into a flow state and experiencing the zen of pure movement is the objective. And Death Stranding 2 is able to tap into both of these desires. You carry things. You move with purity. You exist in a familiar yet alien world, and you can easily find a zen-like state in the mundanity of fetch-questing. Soon the mundanity becomes a little overbearing, though. Death Stranding 2 is crazy easy. It's basically automatic. The only times I died were when intrusive thoughts won and I let myself die to see what happened. I got eaten by the first boss monster and insta-killed—no other boss would ever come close in terms of challenge. I actually redid the final BT boss fight because I accidentally used the wrong EX Grenade on it, and I wanted to capture it. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap18.jpg"/> Combat with human enemies is crazy simple as well. I haven't seen AI this bad in a AAA game in years. Early on I got a sniper rifle, and it was almost the only weapon I used. My Shotgun with a grenade launcher came in handy for boss fights, but otherwise all I would do was roll up to a location with bad guys, shoot the first guy in the head, and then watch as the rest all filed dutifully out into the open as they ran to get within range of me. When they were in range, they were menacing, but only because they possessed a supernatural ability to determine my location. Grenades and electro-spears flew at me regardless of what cover I was behind or how long ago I'd broken line of sight. They always knew where I was, because combat was a deep afterthought. Naturally, difficulty in a game like Death Stranding is more than just the combat. But the traversal is trivial as well, and it only gets more trivial as the game continues. Thanks to the chiral network, the deeper you get in Death Stranding 2, the more online the world around you becomes—and that means other players asynchronously share resources with you. Roads are crafted, ziplines made, electric charging stations constructed in convenient locations. You can interact with that system as much as you like, and honestly, I spent quite a bit of time fetching materials to help out my fellow porters. I didn't do it for the Likes—the game's primary measurement system, stolen directly from Facebook—but for the altruistic thrill of it. There's something nice about helping others, and I'd have done it even if I didn't get feedback telling me someone liked a road I'd made or a charger I built. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap16.jpg"/> The way the game world transforms even without these structures is fantastic as well. I loved making a half dozen trips between two locations only to see, over time, how the terrain subtly altered to mark a path. Like a game trail in the bush, it was slightly easier to traverse without being deliberately constructed. But all of this did make the game too easy. Very quickly, you don't even need to walk places—Sam drives his truck everywhere. You can drive straight past the human enemies if they're not actively guarding an item you need, and BTs pose no threat as you can power past them as well. There are natural disaster-style threats as well, but they're never a factor. They only come into play during specific story beats. Earthquakes and avalanches and bushfires and floods all threaten Sam at various points throughout the game, but they never show up again. Actually there are loads of systems in Death Stranding 2 that the player never really needs to engage with. Or never has the opportunity to engage with. It sometimes feels like there are some very good designers at Kojima Productions, but sadly someone sanded away all the rough edges until what was left was unnaturally smooth. But every game needs friction, and Death Stranding 2s is ruinous. Because the friction points in Death Stranding 2 are not part of the gameplay—they're entirely UX related. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap15.jpg"/> This is the Gameplay Only review, so I'm going to limit this to the 'interacting with' portion of the Death Stranding 2 experience, but I have to be honest when I tell you I think Sam Porter Bridges needs to do a better job of setting boundaries, because he is constantly interrupted by people over absolutely nothing. Often when Sam completes a delivery, he is greeted by some out-of-place cameo who congratulates him on a job well done. And that's fine. It's whatever. But then Sam will impromptu receive a new call from his boss, Fragile. And she'll tell him to return to the DHV Magellan (your base of operations) to get a new job. And it's like, lady, we're already on the phone. It's a holophone, so I can see you. We don't need to be breathing the same fucking air. Just give me the new job now. But still, you go back to the ship because Sam is a fucking homunculus and Fragile spends three minutes telling you something she could have sent in a text. It's reminiscent of Roman calling Niko in Grand Theft Auto IV and asking him to come to a location, except Sam can't reject these calls. He can't just say no. The ultimate betrayal is at the end of the game, when Tarman apparently connects to Sam's Heads-Up-Display to interject an urgent call. Are you telling me I could have been getting exposition while I was driving? But instead, Fragile would have me return to the Magellan, she'd tell me something I already knew, and then about half the time she'd send me back to the terminal I'd just left to accept my next mission. But I was just there, Fragile. I WAS JUST THERE. <img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-thegap20.jpg"/> And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Joab, you're complaining a lot about characters talking when that's not gameplay." But it's gameplay interrupting, isn't it? Then there's how everything needs five more button presses than it should. You can't accept your next mission until you go to sleep for some reason, so that means you have to click on 'Go to your room'. Then you hold X to skip the cutscene where Sam lays down to go to sleep. Then you hold X to skip the cutscene where Sam sits up after sleeping. Then you press X to go back to the surface. Then you hold X to skip the cutscene where Sam is getting into the elevator. Then you walk three steps and press Square to access the terminal. Then you press X to go into the "Accept a new mission" menu. You read the mission. "Deliver X to Y" it says. You press X to accept the mission. Then you wait while somebody tells you why you're delivering X to Y as if it fucking matters. Then you jump in your truck and hold R2 for 12 minutes while occasionally steering around some rocks. "Ugh Joab," you say, "of course the game isn't going to be fun if you never find the fun. Death Stranding 2 is a sandbox! Make your own fun!" I am old now, but I was a child once. I can still find the fun. I can still make my own fun. I can go and huck rocks at trains, or put coins on the tracks to theoretically cause a derailment, or engage in any of the other locomotive-damaging related activities I participated in as a youth. I don't need to involve an ever-increasing-in-price console or 100 Australian dollarydoos worth of video game in this fun-generation scheme you want me to put together. Cut out all the cutscenes, remove the endless Gran Turismo 7-esque menu clicking, and just let me drive around a geographically inaccurate Australia for 15 hours, and I reckon Death Stranding 2 is a solid game. Something I'd cautiously tell people to check out. But that's not what we got. And what we got, I don't want. [[You really did it!]]

Well, you did ask for it. [[Are you implying that a chooseable path reviewventure is a game with fuck-all gameplay and too many words at the end of that review?]]

Part of me is a bit worried I've simply constructed an elaborate strawman to argue against. I'm having a detailed conversation with myself where everything I say is already correct and everything everyone else says is either incorrect or already anticipated by me, because I am playing both sides. Which kind-of undercuts whatever I'm trying to achieve with this entire endeavour, right? But I don't know what I'm trying to achieve to be honest. I just wanted to do something different. That's ok, right? Doing something different is ok. I realise it largely sticks to review structures already agreed upon, but, like, that's not inherently bad. I'm not trying to reinvent reviews or something, just experiment with the format a little. Does this little aside serve as a way to innoculate me against the specific criticism I just brought up and dismissed? I don't think so. I think you could still level that at me, despite my saying it feels like I might be doing it. But on the other hand I can say I predicted you'd make that criticism and that I already addressed it. Addressing criticism doesn't disqualify it but it does make me feel smart, so.

That's one secret I'll never tell. XOXO [[Nice.]]

Because on a fundamental level I don't respect your decision to opt out of spoilers. [[Why offer it then?]]

Because I thought it was funny. [[Ok, fair enough. I think you're funny and witty and very clever for all of this.]]

Oh shucks, you're too nice! Thanks for saying... wait. Are you giving me a taste of that Hideo Kojima medicine right now? [[Absolutely I am.]]

Can you pretend you're my favourite director while doing it? [[It's me, Christopher Nolan, and I am so proud of what you've acheived here Joab.]]

Christopher Nolan isn't my favourite director. My favourite director is someone cool like Akira Kurosawa or something. [[You can't lie to me, Joab. I'm in your head. It's either Christopher Nolan or John McTiernan.]]

Am I basic? [[Yeah buddy, but you knew that.]]

That's true. Thanks for saying you're proud of me, Christohnpher McNoltiernan. [[Yeah dawg, I've got you->Nice.]]

Oh yeah. I wanted to do a bit where I wrote Twin Peaks in the style of Death Stranding 2. Wanna see it? [[Not really.]] [[Do I ever!]]

Fair enough. What now then? [[I guess take me back to those other reviews without forcing me to use the back button?->How would you like your review today?]]

"Dale, it's me, Corpsey, I died and washed up on a lake and it's time for me to explain to you exactly why but in a slightly esoteric manner!" [[Times like these really make you appreciate what editors go through hey.]]

They're the real heroes. [[Who edited this dumpster fire?]]

Me. I almost said nobody, but I did go everything once, so yeah, me. [[Are you going to do credits where you list your name 14 times?]]

I feel like you already ruined that gag. So no. [[Nice.]]

Yeah. It's all there. [[Any regrets?]]

What? No? Of course not. [[Just seems like a lot of effort and some of the stuff you talk about in some of these threads is kinda... you know...]]

<img src="https://thegapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/ds2-depressed.jpg"/> [[Good point->Nice.]]