As a teenager in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with Australian new wave cinema, thanks partly to the Mad Max trilogy, and partly to an English teacher at my high school, who rolled out the TV trolley one afternoon and showed us Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Walkabout. We were mesmerised. Forty years later, I am playing Death Stranding 2, Hideo Kojima’s sprawling apocalyptic adventure, and there are times I feel as if I’m back in that classroom. Most of the game takes place in a ruined Australia, the cities gone, the landscape as stark, beautiful and foreboding as it was in Roeg’s film.
I’ve been playing for 45 hours and have barely made an impact on the story. Instead, I have wandered the wilderness, delivering packages to the game’s isolated communities. The game is set after a catastrophic event has decimated humanity and scarred the landscape with supernatural explosions. Now you pass through vast ochre deserts and on toward the coast, watching the sun set behind glowing mountains, the tide rolling in on empty bays. Usually in open-world games, the landscape is permanent and unchanging, apart from day/night cycles and seasonal rotations. But the Australia of Death Stranding 2 is mysterious and amorphous. Earthquakes bring rocks tumbling down hillsides, vast dust storms blow up and avalanches bury you in snow. As you go, you are able to build roads, electricity generators and even jump-ramps for cars. These can be found and used by other players, so each time you visit a place you may find new ways to traverse. Nothing is ever really still.
Kojima named George Miller as his idol and the influence of the Mad Max movies and their crazed, desolate energy is everywhere in this game: its interplay of technology and isolation; its feudal tribes and scarce resources, its weird sense of adrenaline. He has also seen Walkabout, and that film’s mythic energy is here, too, though perhaps lacking the strong undertone of colonial guilt. There is a rocky outcrop in a remote corner of the game map that reminds me a little of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its labyrinthine crevices, the reddish glow, the unnerving silence.
I’ve spent hours driving along highways in this game, picking up parcels and taking them to strange, inaccessible places – why? How have I been seduced into sitting in front of my screen until 2am ensuring an animal shelter gets its delivery of fluffy pyjamas? The answer is, in creating a version of Australia that is timeless yet subject to moments of extreme change, Kojima has played the same trick Weir did: this world is beguiling and threatening – and that’s what makes it seductive.
Years ago, Weir said this about Picnic at Hanging Rock: “What I attempted was to develop the oppressive atmosphere of something which has no solution: to bring out a tension and claustrophobia in the locations and the relationships. We worked very hard at creating an hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotise the audience away from the possibility of solution.”
That, in short, is my experience of Death Stranding 2. It is a game of hallucinatory mesmeric rhythms; you drive and drive, then hours later you’re back in the same place – except now there is a road, or a sign left by another player who passed in the night. What Grand Theft Auto has always tried to do with American cities, Kojima has succeeded at with the Australian outback: to interpret and distill the feeling of a place from an outsider perspective. That’s why, when I do actually make progress in the game and open up a new area for exploration, I get the same feeling I had when I first saw Walkabout on that rainy afternoon in Manchester as a teenager – it feels as if I am seeing an impossible alien landscape, rife with beauty, possibility and danger. I think it will be months before I escape.
What to play
A few months ago, I interviewed the creator of Quantum Witch, a wildly idiosyncratic pixel art adventure about a shepherdess who loses her flock and then gets tossed into a metaphysical battle between duelling gods. Nikki Jay was raised in a religious cult, but escaped to live her own life – and this game is heavily inspired by her experiences.
Created with a little help from Paul Rose, who wrote Channel 4’s famed teletext gaming zine Digitiser, it’s partly a point-and-click adventure but also a postmodern deconstruction of genre, with queer undertones. If you loved the irreverent humour of Thank Goodness You’re Here, or just want to play something wonderfully offbeat, you have come to the right place.
Available on: PC
Estimated playtime:
Five hours-plus
What to read
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More bad news for games industry employees – MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy is making significant job cuts after the game’s disastrous launch. Plagued by bugs and AI glitches, the title drew negative reviews from both gaming sites and players, and according to IGN, up to 100 staff could now be laid off. What a mess.
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Eurogamer has an excellent interview with voice actor Ashly Burch, looking at the vital question: can video games have a positive impact on mental health? Burch talks about her own experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder and how one game, Harvest Moon 64, helped her to cope.
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We love a classic video game deep dive, and GameSpot has a great piece on how one game designer created the best level in the Deus Ex – the legendary role-playing adventure from Dallas studio, Ion Storm. It’s filled with fascinating detail about the game’s rendition of an alternative Hong Kong.
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What to click
Question Block
This one comes from Adam:
“I’ve recently been playing Be Brave, Barb, the new game by the developer of the delightful Dadish series. I’m enjoying the simple, bite-sized gameplay and have had the same feeling in recent play-throughs of the Game Boy Kirby games. I was wondering: what are the team’s favourite snack-sized games?”
Ever since first playing the short and terrifying horror game Slender, I have been obsessed with weird mini horror titles, so I’ll also add Mouthwashing, Murder House and PT. I also love old PlayStation mini game titles such as Bishi Bashi Special and Point Blank. As for the rest of the team: Keza has gone for Wario Ware, Lonely Mountains and Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket (“yes, still,” she says): Tom Regan says, “In terms of short games to complete: What Remains of Edith Finch, Florence and Inside; in terms of games that you can play in short bursts: Loop Hero, Tetris Effect, Sifu and Cult of the Lamb.” Christian Donlan says Drop7, Into the Breach, Marvel Snap and Spelunky (he also loyally added “The Quick Cryptic on the Guardian is my fav 10 minutes of the week.”) Sarah Maria Griffin said, “I love, love love A Short Hike. And of course, Untitled Goose Game. Perfect little games.”
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@.com.
