I am playing death stranding. So far I have done walking, falling down, walking and trying not to fall down, and throwing bombs made from my blood and excitement at umbilical dementors.
Sometimes Guillermo Del Toro appears to explicitly tell me the literal themes of the story

Everyone in this game talks as if they are delivering the only dramatic spoken dialogue of a music video.

The men all cannot stop themselves from expositing lore, and it feels like the women in the story have been programmed to always say the most confusing thing at every turn

Me: walking like a professional walker

Man in a skull mask: DID YOU KNOW THESE BRIDGES ARE CONSTRUCTED USING A 3D PRINTER POWERED BY DEATH AND ALSO MAYBE TIME TRAVEL SAM

Sister/Mother/???: it’s as if we’ve always been dead together in love, don’t you think?

I might love it but I am also always 30 seconds away from never playing it again

That first tweet was supposed to say excrement but now I am too deep in this dumb thread to start again rip

I have no one else to talk to about it but Erika and she is even more confused than I am, and also playing Bugsnax rn
This is maybe my first ever Kojima game. Are these just the things that are in all of them like Wes Anderson has rotary phones, depression, and the color mustard?

I have continued Death Stranding. The unskippable scenes of the "Chiral Artist" are S'BAD like you're frozen in a coma forced to watch this child/woman(??) dance because Kojima likey, then zip her into what my wife called a fetish cocoon to physically backpack her to boyfriend

knock knock girlfriend delivery

But then like an unknowable skull-faced lion made of otherworldly tar appears out of the woodwork and I'm all the way back in it baybeeee let's walk places foreverrr

But it's not long before a woman named "Mama" reveals she lives w the dead baby she birthed for her infertile identical sister.
It's like Kojima writes men as characters, but when writing women he looked up the wiki entry for "Womany Stuff", scrambled the words, and added ghosts.

Death Stranding is SO close to being seriously chilling and smart, but just *cannot* stop itself from eurovision levels of cringe. It's like watching Lord of the Rings, but mid-tearful-speech Sam loudly breaks wind, stares directly into the camera, and high fives the audience

Death Stranding is like watching the Hobbit movies for the first time

I'm in the endgame, and we are in the process of taking down bad skull man, averting evangelion extinction, when delivery woman Fragile, who runs a delivery company called Fragile, center frame before the final punch lays down the line "I'm frAHgile but I'm not THAT fragEEL"

It's like the third callback to this brutally bad line, but for it's final incarnation the studio note came down "can you read the first fragile in British, but the second fragile in Italian? thx so much" and they KEPT that for the FINALE.
AND I CAN'T STOP PLAYING, EXPLAIN

Underneath is a completely riveting worldbuilding project connecting earth's historical extinctions with tar/fossil fuel made of ancient corpses, compelling evolutionary metaphor, a government conspiracy to use stillborn babies to bridge the gap between our world and death-

And the design is just absolutely chef's kiss tier stuff- understated, tasteful, chilling. Set to haunting music that brings the whole experience together on the rare occasions the songs trigger.
AND THEN THEY ADD LITERAL ACTUAL CONAN O'BRIEN IN AN OTTER HAT

Anyways, I don't know why I am doing this to you. It's possible that I find 71k to be a baffling number and I am trying to scare some of you off. (If I didn't shake you after the Kingdom Hearts thread, i assume you're here for the long haul)
I just have to process this somehow