After a long and suspenseful wait, Hideo Kojima’s highly-anticipated brainchild Death Stranding is finally out on the PS4. At last, all of the invisible monsters, babies in capsules, and Mads Mikkelsen will be explained in full. Or so we thought, anyway: along with the game, we picked up a hardcover copy of the official Death Stranding game guide, which promises on the cover to “do its best.”
“The first thing you’re going to want to do is take stock of your surroundings,” the official guide states. “Watch out for any weird shit. If there’s weird shit, you probably want to avoid it. Seriously, anything out of the ordinary, just walk around it in a wide berth. It seems like there are creepy invisible monsters around, which probably explains why you sometimes just die without warning. Try to avoid those? Well, they’re invisible, so… just give it your best shot, and if you get killed, try again. Good luck. Maybe watch the trailer again. We really don’t know.”
“If we’re being honest when we were writing this book we didn’t expect to have an entire section on shoe maintenance and management,” the guide says after closing out a chapter on remembering to take deep breaths when feeling existentially panicked. “But here we are. This chapter is going to be 20 pages long, by the way, without pictures and stuff. Do you think we enjoy this?”
“Also Conan is in the game,” the guide goes on. “So what the fuck is going on with that? Where’s Andy? What does he even add to the show? It’s like, why is Andy there? He doesn’t even play an instrument or something and he gets his own couch? For two decades? What does he bring to the table?”
While the book does go on to discuss the less peculiar encounters you may experience, it does so in exceptionally frank terms: “There are human enemies too. You might think, ‘They’re just humans, this is something that I understand. They don’t scare me.’ And you’re wrong, because you don’t understand, and you should be scared. These humans are very not-invisible, which is a mercy, but it seems like you don’t really have any weapons? Probably best to steer clear, right? Your guess is as good as ours. Just maintain a constant, healthy level of fear of everything you encounter, and maybe you won’t die. We’ve honestly just been watching people play this on YouTube.”
At just $30, Nerfwire highly recommends the Death Stranding official game guide. Not because it’s helpful, but because it makes you feel less alone.
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