We're republishing this article from April 2022 to coincide with Death Stranding's launch on PC Game Pass.I recently got around to reading Hideo Kojima's The Creative Gene, a collection
We’re republishing this article from April 2022 to coincide with Death Stranding’s launch on PC Game Pass (opens in new tab).
I recently got around to reading Hideo Kojima’s The Creative Gene (opens in new tab), a collection of essays by the designer on a diverse range of pop culture topics: re-issues of animes he liked watching as a kid, reviews of new science fiction novels, retrospectives on great movies. As anyone with an interest in Kojima’s work might expect, it is a book that veers between searing insight and tiresome navel-gazing. You’re absorbed on some pages, and your eye’s flicking to the next paragraph on others.
While the book is a grab-bag of essays with no real through-line, it does have a theme—loneliness. When Kojima writes about a given topic, his tendency is to connect it to periods in his life, some of which are described in great detail. The book is full of ghosts, Kojima’s father in particular, and how Kojima thinks about certain works is bound-up with his first experiences of it in the context of his own life. While the overall tone of things always returns to the triumphal—Kojima never shies from adding in a reference to his own hugely successful oeuvre—it is a book shot-through with feelings of isolation and, in some cases, futile regret.
This was a good staging ground from which to embark once more on Death Stranding’s journey across a near-future and wasted landscape. Death Stranding: The Director’s Cut adds a whole bunch of new stuff to the game (read about it here (opens in new tab)), though this all seems mostly backloaded and the first 12 hours or so are familiar from my first playthrough at launch.
Except… the real world’s a bit different. Death Stranding was released in November 2019. A month later, a novel virus outbreak was detected in Wuhan, China, and within months almost the entire world had entered some form of coronavirus-related lockdown.
(Image credit: Kojima Productions and 505 Games)
“The world was designed such that Sam almost never sees another human being in the flesh.”
Let’s not overdo things here but, like everyone else, I’ve gone through two-and-a-half years that have been spent mostly at home, the first year almost entirely. I now live in a world where I don’t even notice the plastic screens at supermarket checkouts anymore, nevermind find anything unusual about passing dozens of masked individuals on a town walk, and where my kids sometimes come home from school and I have to jam a cotton bud up their nose.
