Remember when Mass Effect 2 launched on the PlayStation 3? Because the original game had been an exclusive, PlayStation owners were thrown a bone in the form of the free Genesis DLC, a story recap that caught them up on the events of the original game in case they didn’t own a PC or Xbox to play it on.
Mass Effect: Genesis condensed a 30-hour RPG down to roughly 14 minutes. Sony’s attempt to do the same for Death Stranding is a six-minute video recap of a game that’s twice as long and like five times as circuitous.
Part of what made me love Death Stranding is how it threw you into a baffling world and then slowly made sense of it, and by the time I got to the end I did feel pretty on-board with its mythology of personalized extinction, suggesting that each time a dominant species gets wiped out is preceded by an overlap between the lands of the living and the dead with one “extinction entity” chosen to be the driver for it. (Though the idea of one real special ammonite becoming aware of this mythic cycle does crack me up).
Sony’s video will not give you that same level of insight. It obviously skips over a huge amount of story, reducing Mads Mikkelsen to a cameo and leaving out all the stuff about Bridge Babies being the children of braindead mothers kept on life support to create a living connection with the land of the dead. Which is one of like 20 bugfuck nutso ideas Death Stranding just kind of throws at you in between the bits where you deliver DVD box sets or whatever.
I’m not saying this recap video won’t help refresh your memory for Death Stranding 2. It just has a lot of ground to cover and it smooths over some mountains along the way.
If you don’t have time to replay Death Stranding before the sequel comes out on June 26, the recap will at least remind you of a few character names and significant plot beats, just in time for another 60 hours or so of pleasant bafflement when Death Stranding 2 arrives.
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