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!