Episode 88 - Jimmy Won't Return - Death Stranding

We’re NOCLIP. But we’re not that NOCLIP. Welcome to the UCA, listeners, because today we’re talking about Death Stranding. This game has been stirring up a bit of controversy among the AAA game discussion crowd, coming from Metal Gear visionary Hideo Kojima and yet being mostly a game about how walking around with a bunch of stuff on your back is hard to do. While you’ll have to listen to the episode to get all the nuances of why we feel the way we do on the game’s many aspects, I think we’ve landed fairly positive overall, which is not to say the controversy is not well deserved. This game does some very different things that aren’t expected of a game with this budget, this creator, and hell, this star power, which is even a weird thing to say about a game. This is a game you have to sit with and its long run time means that you’ll be sitting for a while and whether this game is an acquired taste or a taste you need to born with is a question we’ll leave to history to decide, it is certainly an interesting taste and a dish we’re happy to serve this week on the podcast. We’re going to be talking about the utility of things to shoot in a game that isn’t really focused on it, an assumption of weirdness that might overshadow a clearer reading of a game, and a biological feature of Sam Bridges that is an objective 0 out of 10. Thank you for joining us this week! This game is one we wanted to do pretty much immediately given its pedigree and potential for hot takes, but coming up we’re kicking off the new year with a game that we waited so long to do it was remade and released on a new console. That is, The Legend of Zelda, Link’s Awakening (but like, the Switch version). And keep an eye out because coming up sometime in the near future, we will be reprising our favorite end-of-year non-game-specific fortunately-hyphen-free discussion episode: The NOCLIP Awards!