The Ghost of the Road - A Death Stranding Review

The Sims

photo credit: Visible_Star_7783

The first thing I do when I gain control of Sam Porter Bridges is throw him off a cliff.

It’s on purpose, y’see, it’s faster than going around the jagged cliff edge and climbing down handful after handful of rope into the canyon, and the damage done to the doll that is Sam Porter Bridges from the fall is negligible. In fact, all it takes to right the ship is wait five agonizing seconds for him to stand up, then rock his belly baby for a moment, listen to it coo, and we’re back on track. He loses blood, but I don’t care for that.

It’s faster and that’s why I do it. I get to another cliff and I throw virtual-simulacra Daryl Dixon off it with a laugh, watch him tumble while I mash down the triggers (a little cheat code the game gives you to never properly fall over), listen to him grunt and moan (his voice is a little sexy, I can’t lie), and then I mash buttons until he gets back up on his feet, gets balanced, and gets his ass headed to the incinerator. On the double.

The mission: I’m making him carry his dead mom on his back. She just died. I think this is funny. She is wrapped in white. Just this solidified object of death strapped to Sam’s back—the heaviest thing I’ve carried so far. I point at the screen. I call for my partner. When she looks, I giggle, “look at him, he’s like a little doll, poor guy.”

Off another cliff he goes.

“But why?” She asks. She’s very sweet. Hair like blue slushie. She’s played this game before, and she’s astonished every time I do something.

“You see,” I say, hunching towards her. “I am like a twelve-year-old girl playing Sims for the first time. This is my Sim.” Kablamo! I make him run too fast and he face-plants into pure rock. No mud. “I’m going to make him pay for the sin of being on my screen and I’m going to love every moment of it.”

I laugh. She shakes her head, turns away, and (I imagine) smiles, pleased that her feral hound is enjoying a meal.

Send It

“Thank fucking god I’m not playing this game on launch.” I say this to my partner some time later, and I mean it. Sam’s walking somewhere. I’m drinking a beer. The sun hasn’t moved for 5 hours of playtime. I’m crossing a river and if it weren’t for InjuredPenguin’s ladder bridging the distance, my Sim would have taken a deep, long bath and scattered a body-busting weight of packages across a mile of in-game coast. I don’t know how people braved the treacherous landscape of Death Stranding before ambient objects made incursions through the multiplayer.

photo credit: Only_Transition_1803

There’s bridges. Rope tethers. Signage. All connecting various walking paths across the game’s first open map. I load up Sam with two millions tons of metal and ceramics and push the stick, forcing him up the hill. He huffs and puffs around every rock. I slam as many “Likes” my thumb can muster as I pass by pisstroll’s baby sign. It makes the little creature plugged into my belly happy, and that makes me happy. Silent prayers to past-me for making the correct choice of buying an Xbox controller instead of one of those speaker-holding PlayStation controllers. Hearing BB cry or coo from a speaker a few feet away is enjoyable. Having it right in my face while I sit motionless like a goblin for the entire day would kick my body into Mother-Mode and I (nor my partners) are ready for that.

“Those are desire paths,” my partner says. She’s munching a chicken tender, mouth half-full. She’s talking about the indentations in the world. The grooves of other players’ digital feet. I’m aware of this somehow. Must’ve read about it years ago. Or just assumed. Regardless, they are making me lose my fucking mind.

“I know,” I say. “I’m losing my fucking mind. I can’t stop thinking about them. I’m obsessed.”

I am always scanning, finger on the right bumper, waiting for it to charge up again so I can highlight the world before me. I am always reading the names. Smashing that Like button. I am enamored with the desire paths. I am enamored with the fact that I am playing the game long after these paths were etched. I am in love with the idea that someone in 2019 walked a path because, like me, she wanted to get somewhere fast, and it showed through digital space onto someone else’s game and so they walked it because it made their walk faster, and then another followed suit and another and continuously until it became The Path.

I am walking The Path up the hill, into the forest. I am listening to Low Roar. I am constantly looking for something to throw my doll off of.

Sam can’t walk any further even though I’m force-feeding him with a full liter of the Energy-Drink-Formerly-Known-As-Monster-Energy-Drink, so he stops and sits. He’s breathing little puffs into the air. I get up and smoke on the back porch with my partner and come back to a sleeping Sim. The game knows I am mistreating him. The game takes care of him when I’m gone. Let’s him sleep. Feel human.

“Aww. My poor baby,” I say and press all the buttons I can. It wakes him up. “Back to it, slut.”

“Babe!” my partner says. But Sam doesn’t remark on it. Just gets up and back to work. His lack of acknowledgement of the sleep timer reading “10 minutes, 37 seconds” tells me that he’s grateful for what he was given. Like a good little Sim. Next I’m going to put him in a pool and delete the ladder and watch him slowly die. Next I’ll make him dance with gunfire. Or walk him into the deep part of the river. Next he will make a return trip with an even bigger load and lose his bike and have to carry it piece by piece for miles. Next he will fall asleep in the rain while I have sex in the next room.

“Tony Hawk is a skateboarding game,” I say to my sweaty partner in bed. She sighs. “But Death Stranding has the philosophy of skateboarding.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.”

She’s leaving and I think I’m onto something.

Skateboarding, street at least, is all about “sending it.” It’s about turning the world, your world, your city, streets, alleys, and parks into toys. That rail looks grindable. That wall looks rideable. That hill looks bombable. And sometimes, when you’re hard-as-fuck, the less-bombable a hill looks, the better. The way I take a bike off the ridge, foot on the gas, giggling, reminds me of Marshal Manuel sending it luge-style on a brick sidewalk down a massive gutter of a hill. When I make a wrong move, misjudge a jump, and my bike explodes on impact, I think about Jake Brown on the mega ramp. I size up a path down the mountain that’ll make this trip a hundred times faster, hit the boost on the bike, and carve my way down. I feel like Ryan Sheckler hitting the Costco gap. I feel like god.

photo credit: Still_Jellyfish7352

Destruction Paths

I’m six hours into my first day of playing when sixteen BT’s grab me by the ankles, calves, and kneecaps, and drag me seven hundred miles away from my bike (I stole it out of the garage, thanks saphicgeorgelopez). I am in the goop. I am trudging towards the edge. There is a fucking whale or something chasing me. And then, there is a fucking whale or something crushing me. It kills me. Big whoop.

But the crater I leave on the map is beautiful. I wonder if it, like the desire paths, will appear in others’ worlds. A destruction path. A way for me to impact the game long after release. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it is just for me.

Sam wakes up on the edge of the crater and I look down into the black pit. See the outline of a massive hand. Realize I’m in the most fascinating fantasy world of the 2010’s.

I am enamored with the crater. I am in love with this game because I love desire paths, yes. But I am passionately making out with this game because it lets me explode and leave craters across its surface. We are in a toxic relationship together. It gives me things to bash against. It is designed to frustrate Sam and entertain me. And I am designed to leave an impact. I am designed to carve and hurt. The map is a brat and I am its dom. Sam is merely the flogger I keep near my bed that says “fuck pig” on it.

The Ghost of the Road

You’d think with how late in the game’s life cycle I got into it, all the roads would be complete as soon as I hoof it the thirty miles across the Martian peninsula and hook up everyone with the wifi password, but, low-and-behold, no such luck. There’s a stretch of smooth, completed, plastic-metal road that goes from the bottom of the map and up around the bend, but beyond that it’s up to Sam. My little trooper.

The roads hit me like a drug. There’s something so sensual about loading up the Half-Life sponsored lambda truck’s fifty-five beds with every order I can find between here and there, and delivering them all in one go. I’m getting turned on when I deliver five orders at one time to the same place. I’m having nocturnal emissions imagining the ultimate delivery.

No, seriously, okay, picture this: I start in Lake Knot City, hit the Engineer and the Craftsman but not the Elder cause fuck that guy, the road doesn’t go up there so neither am I, then hit the Distribution Center South of Lake Knot City and drive allllllllllll the way to South Knot City. I orgasm at the thought. I am creaming as I type.

Doing that requires I do a bunch of other large loads between those places to acquire the seven-metric-tons of materials needed to construct the necessary roads. So I’m doing mega-deliveries in the truck. Back and forth. Ignoring the main story. I don’t even know what it is anymore. I’m looking for my sister or something? Well, she just texted me to remind me of Mother’s Day on Sunday, so I think I’m good on that front, chief. I am making ultra-deliveries and exclaiming that I do not want off Hideo Kojima’s wild ride. I am driving through dark rain and out of craters. I am flipping off the Elder as I careen hard into the Craftsman’s place. I am picking up every single order. I am diligent. I am a good worker. I am now in it for the long-haul torture of “how long can I keep Sam from showering, pissing, or shitting (which are all things the game asks me to do)?” I am staying out for entire play sessions, picking up and delivering. I am baking the roads into my body. I am, well, becoming a trucker.

Fuck.

God damn it.

Give me a minute. I need to smoke. Let’s fade to black real quick.

Fade in: Eight-year-old Sam Porter Bridges stays out late one evening, riding her bike. She likes riding her bike, I think, and also she’s a girl; memories are weird. But she likes riding her bike, I think. I also think she doesn’t know what else to do. She doesn’t have friends during this memory. New town. New school. Whatever. Not the point. She stays out late one evening and she does it on purpose this time.

“Your father leaves at five,” her mom, the fucking President of the United States, says to her. So she rides off and when the clock gets to five, she thinks up a devious scheme. Muwahaha. Steepled fingers. She’s going to stay out later than five. That’ll make it so dad can’t leave. Cause he always gives her a hug and a kiss before he’s gone for the week or two that he’ll be OTR (on the road), making deliveries. It makes sense to her that if he doesn’t give her the hug OR the kiss, then he won’t be able to leave. Genius! A magnum opus of an idea.

But, surprising only her, when she gets home at five thirty, her father is gone.

She cries into her mother’s (the President of the United States’s) lap the rest of the night.

Hard cut to black. Fade in: text that says “Directed by Hideo Kojima.”

Growing up with a trucker for a father couldn’t have been easy for little Sam Bridges. It must have been like having a ghost haunt your house, but only on Saturday, because on Sunday it sleeps and the rest of the days it's away. On occasion, the ghost would get angry at the fact that it was a ghost and would lash out, marking one of those limited days with rage.

photo credit: New_SnakeBR

From the ages of 20 to 23, I worked in a warehouse. Truckers came to us, backed into the dock, I unloaded them, they spoke to the desk, and then they left. This happened hundreds of times each week. Thousands of times over my time there. My shoulder carries it as a harsh pain. My body aged during those years, quick and unnatural. Achy and old all of a sudden, like taken by a sudden gust of time-fallen rain. An altogether different creature.

Sam makes a delivery. Speaks briefly to the attendant. I don’t skip the cutscene this time. I watch the cargo get carried down into the floor. I imagine the twenty-year-old me down there, beneath the surface, unpacking and categorizing everything. I imagine my father picking up three more orders heading to nowhere, loading them onto his bright, yellow truck, and puttering off, only to be heard or seen again on the weekend, when he’s done with work and is finally allowed to shower, shit, and piss.

I’m driving down the black-tar road. A view of rolling, Midwest hill around where I grew up. I cross the overpass my friends and I used to climb up and press our faces against just to feel the intense vibrations of the cars overhead. I am collecting materials to finish the roads. To deliver more and more. I’ve played for over forty hours, a full work week. No sign of EOS (end of shift).

“Wow, 13k likes,” my partner says

“What? What for? I was looking at my phone.”

“All the roads, I assume,” she says.

Impact

The next day, we’re in the car driving the three hours to my parent’s house. We listen to music too loud. We talk and fondle each other. I try not to think about how our car could only fit one of Sam Porter Bridge’s order in it, and wouldn’t be able to go off-road at all. Not like my big rig in the game. Perish the thought. Instead, we stop at a gas station somewhere outside South Knot City, grab a Monster Energy drink, and kiss.

At the house, a ghost sits where it’s always sat; in its chair, watching television. It doesn’t talk to me much. Doesn’t look at me. I see the back of its head from the couch as the chair is aimed away from me. Mom is there. They both have a hard time referring to me as their daughter, but mom’s trying at least. I don’t know if the ghost understands. I don’t know if it thinks of me at all, really. I leave no impact.

I’m about to talk about Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima’s “QWOP” adaptation, and this article I’m writing about it, about how I think of the ghost, and I think about being a trucker, and I wonder what it’s like out there. But I don’t.

Instead, we drive home late and I continue to play. Whatever I did last, Sam awakens in his private room, face a-gored with back viscera. 47,000 likes come in for all the roads I’ve rebuilt.

“You need to make him take a shower,” my partner says. And I do. I clean up my doll. I let my Sim make faces in the mirror. I let him piss. And shit. I play with my baby. I’ve collected a lot of new figurines and I examine them. I change the color of my glasses. I put on a hat. I play with my baby again.

I’m in the mountains now, where it snows, and the journeys are easier going on foot than in my big rig, so it stays in the garage. I go to collect my orders and there’s five I could take, but I only grab what I can reasonably carry.

photo credit: BrilliantCheetah1916

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Also, GoblinJunkyard on the discord server posted a review/essay about their experience trying to translate World’s End Journey so they can understand it and, well, play it. So go check that out by clicking here.

Thanks,

Snow