Finished death stranding

Spoilers under the fold

The game could have ended much sooner i think. The ending didn’t need to be back to back gun-based boss fights (higgs’ monster, higgs, cliff, flying tar monster), and then 4 hours of cutscenes (1 of which is in-engine and unskippable), two different credit sequences, and lots of repeated dialogue from multiple perspectives.

The final resolution of who Cliff Ungar is makes sense and the full scope of the story makes sense and is quite sad, but most of the emotional beats felt hollow because I had already guessed most of the details. Showing Bridget to be a cruel monster was a nice touch tho.

I did cry when Lou came back to life in Sam’s arms, that part hit. And I conceptually liked the time spent on the Beach but it was past midnight and I’d been playing for 6 hours and I was ready to be done with the game.

Amelie’s whole backstory took so long to tell that I couldn’t pay attention and kept forgetting details as she popped into and out of vote lol. Could not tell you a coherent version of her story right now.

I did call that Peter Englebert was bad like 2 months ago, lol. Made a joke about being excited to shoot him and now i feel like a genius.

Except for all that, 10/10. If you stop playing after the Higgs boss fights, you’ve seen the whole game and aren’t missing out on much of anything except minor Lou plot stuff that is admittedly quite touching.

Can’t wait to play Tears of the Kingdom for the next 6 months.