Everyone has got their best Death Stranding takes out of the way, but I still have something to say. Don’t bring down the shutters just yet, please, it’s not even two years old?
I love walking around in Death Stranding. Empty space in games is often the bane of my existence. I generally can’t deal with the vast expanses of open world games, they give me option paralysis and I feel exhausted. Death Stranding is different though, because Sam is so grounded in the world, it makes just traversing it feel like a task worth undertaking.
That’s largely due to the way the world has been considered as an active element. In my brief time making environments in the Unreal Engine for my Master’s course, the ground is something I barely thought about. You construct paths, and think about flows through your environment, but the verb of “traversal” in games is rarely that interesting when you’re on the ground. The ground is essentially a flat plane, and textures hide that from the player. Avatars rarely interact with the real furrows and inclines, they just glide ghost like over the floor. Moving is boring.
But! Wall-running! Humping, dashing, grappling hooks, blinking, vehicles, — these are all forms of movement designed there to make the player excited, to give them ways to enjoy the basic task of going from A to B. Death Stranding allows for a lot of this excitement too with its ziplines and bikes, but there’s something incredibly solid and tactile about just plodding across rocks, about planning your steps between uneven rocks and slippery grass, stumbling as you shift your balance from one foot to the other.
It has made me think about the process of movement in games in general, mainly 3D games and open worlds, and how it’s usually something you only do to get to the next place. Rarely is the joy in motion itself. It also made me think about all of the processing our mind does as we walk out and about. The balancing, the route finding, all of it innate.
Put a controller in our hands, and give us a in-game representation of how hard it is to traverse an incline or a scatter of rocks, and suddenly a mechanic starts forming out one of the most fundamental forms of locomotion. Simply putting one foot in front of the other is a challenge our bodies have worked out, but in games we ignore this for simplicities sake. We’ve been trained to push the stick, and go.
It’s because of this that Death Stranding's vehicles didn’t do it for me in. The game eventually becomes one of paving over the terrain that provided so much interest, all in the pursuit of ease. The whole game is about logistics, and as Matthewmatosis explains, logistics is the process of making make things more efficient. In Death Stranding, logistics results in removing the core experience, which is the joy of walking around in its harsh landscapes. The game wants you to pave over this world that is resistant to you, to impose your will on its many faceted valleys and dales, to remove all of the friction that makes it so wonderful. It wants to take us back to flat but textured planes.
It was right after getting to this point that I stumbled upon Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a game with a similarly refreshing feel. It’s not as grandiose and awe-inspiring as Death Stranding, but it does focus on locomotion with enough granularity through wild, untamed landscapes. These environment are so well designed, that despite being flat cubist renderings of the world, they are full of the kind of inescapable complexity and friction that I find so interesting in video game environments.
The game is an arcade looking mountain bike trail experience. Like Trials: Evolution, its about getting from the start of a route to the end without as few faults and restarts as you can, in the quickest time possible. What makes it fascinating to me, is the initial exploration of each route. Without a timer, you cycle these mountain, forest and desert paths from a start point to a base camp.
Every section of these runs requires meticulous analysis of the ground. A downward incline that is too steep will see you topple head over heals, a less-beaten path between trees and weeds sees you chicaning between detritus should you come a cropper.
Like Death Stranding, the innate appeal of movement is perhaps hard to understand without the game on your screen, and your pad in hand. But there is something exceptional about the way it feels like cycling. There’s no way to recreate the real process of biking in a game, but Lonely Mountains feels close. Your eyes dart just ahead of your rider, figuring out routes, weighing up the instinctual understanding of terrain that retains the visual cues of the real world despite its stylised leanings. Dark paths are ones less trodden, light paths are less resistant, angles of rocks are intuited at a glance.
Motion becomes meditative, and the process of exploring these knotted routes through environments begins to feel somewhat zen, as brooks babble, birds chirp, and wind whistles, only interrupted by the skid of tires and whizz of gears.
Now and then you might find a place to find reprise — a sunny spot to sit, just like you might on a real bike ride. These moments of pause are the exact sort of subline punctuation mark that your bike rides need. They let you digest the route in your mind, commit it to memory, and think about how you might tackle a particularly challenging bit of traversal when under the duress of a time limit.
The arbitrary boundaries of its time trial challenges aren’t what I signed up for, but at their best they wed you closer to the ground. They make you feel the gravity of every harsh turn, the exhilaration of each jump off a cliff onto a boulder angled just so that you can pivot off it and onto the next piece of the downhill slalom.
In the current world situation, where we’re stuck inside, and going out and about feels like a bad idea, these two games have let me at least think about the way we move through worlds that resist us. The joy of putting one step ahead of another, or guiding a bicycle just right through uneven ground.
It’s made me think about the other ways we move in games. How climbing in Breath of the Wild was simultaneously so freeing, but so mechanically bland in comparison to the tactile grappling of Grow Home. How do you solve the tension between the two? How can swimming in games be made to work? Can we ever get a proper bouldering game, a game that makes feel pushing into the untamed wilds feel real without the threat of combat?
I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions, but I do think that more games should take the time to look at the ground immediately below them, and think about it means to put one foot down in front of the other, to step on ground we’ll never touch.
