Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds – The New York Times

Death Stranding, the newest video game from the developer Hideo Kojima, was introduced to the world in the summer of 2016 on a stage at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the gaming industry’s annual trade-show extravaganza. The event was what the industry calls a press conference, but this particular spectacle more closely resembled the scene in “King Kong” when the beast is displayed to the public in a Broadway theater. A live orchestra struck up a blaring John Williams-style score as the curtain lifted to reveal a sloping stage, at the very top of which stood Kojima, a slight Japanese man with swooping black hair and glasses. The floor began to light up underneath him, panes of light flying in from left and right to create a sort of light bridge, which he bounded down to shake a Sony executive’s hand. Then he stood at center stage, beaming, to deafening applause.

Kojima proceeded to play perhaps the strangest three and a half minutes of video ever to grace the E3 stage. Keep in mind that this is a venue where cybernetic dinosaurs and giant-felling samurai are par for the course. The video opened with a William Blake poem, the first lines of “Auguries of Innocence,” then cut to a close-up of highly realistic computer-generated sand. The camera floated over the sand, revealing a jumble of dead crabs. Handprints appeared in the sand and then filled up, inexplicably, with black goop. The handprints led to a naked man lying on the beach, his left wrist locked in glowing handcuffs. A black cord connected the man to what appeared to be a tiny infant, lying next to him on the sand. The man rose to his hands and knees and crawled over to the baby and picked it up and cradled it in his hands, bringing it to his chest, and his face was revealed and it was … Norman Reedus from “The Walking Dead”? And he was weeping hysterically?

There was no hint as to the story, the gameplay or even the genre of the game. It was all mood and symbol and Norman Reedus’s shiny posterior. It was more like something you’d see at MoMA than at E3. But the crowd went wild.

The reaction might not have been much different if he had shown a blank screen. Kojima is one of a very few video-game developers who can generate enormous anticipation for a game based on his name alone. Over his 30 years in the industry, he has come to exert the sort of reality-distorting effect on gamers that Steve Jobs did on electronics consumers, with an almost supernatural ability to persuade people to get onboard with ideas that would seem totally preposterous coming from anyone else. For decades he expressed those ideas as a developer with the Japanese game giant Konami, creating and shepherding its Metal Gear Solid series. The games of that series brazenly rejected the seamless fun typically associated with the medium, preferring instead to trawl choppier aesthetic waters. Nevertheless, they became one of the most successful franchises of all time. Now, as everyone in the audience knew, Kojima was on his own after a spectacular breakup with Konami. He had started an independent studio and signed a contract with Sony Interactive Entertainment that would give him greater creative freedom to develop this new game.

Given the idiosyncrasies of his previous creations, the audience could only wonder at what he might do with so much freedom. The bizarre trailer was perfectly calibrated to stoke that curiosity while leaving it maddeningly unfulfilled. Just trust me, it said. It’s going to be good.

Over the next three years, Kojima continued to be maddeningly obscure in teasing the game. Following the Death Stranding hype cycle was a bit gamelike in itself, as fans were forced to construct some mental image of the game out of Kojima’s sporadic hints. He talked a lot during those years, and everything he said seemed only to confuse the picture. “It would be like telling you who’s the killer in a mystery novel,” he told the website Digital Spy, when pressed for specifics.

At times, he seemed to be describing a fairly conventional action game, with vehicles and combat and a world to explore. At others, Death Stranding sounded like nothing that had come before. Kojima said it would initiate an entirely new genre, the “strand” genre: “You will attempt to bridge the divides in society,” he wrote on Twitter, “and in doing create new bonds or ‘Strands’ with other players around the globe. Through your experience playing the game, I hope you’ll come to understand the true importance of forging connections with others.”

In another statement to Digital Spy, Kojima said he was inspired by “The Rope,” a short story by the Japanese novelist Kobo Abe. In the story, Abe writes that the first tools humanity invented were the stick and the rope — the first an instrument of violence, meant (as Kojima put it) to “keep away bad things,” the second an instrument of connection, meant to “keep good things close to you.” In Death Stranding, “you will be able to use what will be the equivalent of sticks,” Kojima went on. “But I also want people to use what will be the equivalent of ropes.”

The gaming press reported all these utterances with good-natured incomprehension. In some corners of the internet, though, you could sense an undercurrent of skepticism beginning to rise as the game’s release drew closer. There were whispers that it might be a self-indulgent mess, that Kojima had gone entirely off the deep end. The phrase “I still don’t know what this game is about” became a sort of meme in the comments section under many Death Stranding-related YouTube videos and blog posts; what once seemed like an expression of appreciation took on a slightly worried tone. Kojima certainly didn’t try to assuage their fears. “Even now, I don’t understand the game,” he told The Financial Times in September, just over a month before its debut. “Its worldview, gameplay, they are all new.”

[Can you really be addicted to video games?]

How do you explain Hideo Kojima to someone who has never picked up a PlayStation controller? His admirers have often compared him to filmmakers: Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, George Lucas, James Cameron. Each comparison has its merits. Like Lucas, Kojima is inseparable from a beloved franchise, in Metal Gear Solid, that has achieved mythic status among fans; like Tarantino, he cheekily shows off his virtuo­sity through postmodern tricks of deconstruction and self-referentiality. The narratives of the Metal Gear Solid games can be hallucinatorily surreal and difficult to follow, in a Lynchian manner, but at the same time the games are staggeringly popular big-budget blockbusters that marry technical wizardry with cheesy melodrama, à la Cameron.

Perhaps more notable than his resemblance to any particular film director is the fact that such a comparison would be made at all. Video-game creators tend not to be recognized, much less celebrated; while most film buffs can name the directors of their favorite movies, appreciation of even the best video games often begins and ends with the quality of the experience playing it. The defining characteristic of video games is their interactivity. When you play a game, the thing that sticks out about the experience tends to be what you can do and how you can do it. As the author and game designer Ian Bogost has pointed out, video games are a narcissistic medium, which may be part of why they’re such a cultural force these days. If you step away, you may understand that the game’s mechanics, narrative and characters are all designed by someone, but in the moment they seem to be primarily enablers of your own personal adventure.

When you play a Kojima game, though, you know you are playing a Kojima game — and not just because his name tends to be all over them. The critic Jeremy Parish, one of the sharpest writers on Kojima, has noted that with each game in the Metal Gear Solid series, from Metal Gear Solid (1998) through Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain (2015), “Kojima has been drawing closer to realizing some platonic ideal of ‘video games’ that exists only in his mind.”

It is not easy to sum up Kojima’s oeuvre. There are really two ways of looking at him, and they don’t totally fit together. The first is that Kojima is a brilliant innovator who has managed to consistently expand the notion of what video games can be for more than three decades. The Metal Gear Solid series enshrined his reputation as the father of a new genre, “stealth” action, based around sneaking and subterfuge rather than the run-and-gun gameplay favored by most action games then (and now). They’re games in which the object is not to kill anyone, which goes against what long has been the essence of the action game. But Metal Gear Solid managed to make picking your way through enemy-infested territory immersive and fun. (Kojima has cast stealth partly as a political choice, saying that the harrowing stories of wartime Tokyo he heard from his parents led him to create a game that emphasized nonviolence.)

Kojima’s second major innovation was the way he applied cinematic storytelling to console video games. Hollywood-style narratives had been tried in games before, but they tended to founder on unimaginative stories, sub-B-movie acting and jarring shifts in visual style between the gameplay and the noninteractive narrative sequences (“cutscenes,” in video game lingo). Dylan Holmes, in his book on video-game story­telling, “A Mind Forever Voyaging,” has noted that Metal Gear Solid created a seamless transition between game and story by rendering its cutscenes in the same graphical engine as the rest of the game. Top-notch voice acting, a dynamic orchestral score and a complicated techno-conspiracy plot — which dealt with serious real-life themes like genetic engineering and nuclear proliferation — created a mature, surprisingly affecting narrative unlike anything gamers had encountered.

But then there’s that second, trickier story: about Kojima the egotist, a man grown too infatuated with his own ideas. To praise the Metal Gear Solid series, you must hack through a thick forest of caveats. In addition to being innovative, graphically stunning and meticulously designed, the games are deeply weird and frequently stupid. The game writer Anthony Burch summed up this quality of Kojima’s work perfectly in a book he wrote with his sister, Ashly Burch, about their complicated love of Metal Gear Solid: “You get a sense, for good or ill, that nobody ever told Kojima ‘no.’ That any idea, no matter how seemingly dissonant or irrelevant, was ever shot down.”

At its best, what I have come to think of as Kojima Weirdness gives the games a personality seldom found in a big-budget action game. Playing them can feel like exploring the deepest recesses of an obsessive and endlessly imaginative mind. At its worst, though, Kojima Weirdness can leave you shaking your head at just how ridiculous that mind can be. There’s the recurring gag in which characters soil themselves. There are the twisting, sprawling plots that leave you with only the barest inkling of what happened. Then there’s the dialogue, which ranges from OK to very bad with an average of not so good. Some have tried to interpret Kojima’s warmed-over action-movie clichés as a self-conscious parody, pointing to his penchant for metatrickery. But the worst clunkers are often delivered during the most pivotal moments of his games, which suggests the chilling possibility that their authors (Kojima often co-writes his games) believed these lines were actually powerful. “Do you think love can bloom, even on a battlefield?” Otacon, the main character’s nerdy sidekick, says at one point in the first Metal Gear Solid.

“Yeah, I do,” the main character replies. “I think at any time, any place, people can fall in love with each other.”

On balance, I’ve found that the off-kilter writing tends to add to the charm of the series. The same can’t be said for its treatment of women. In the first game, the protagonist, Solid Snake, hits his two female allies with dumb pickup lines within the first 30 seconds or so of meeting them. There’s a whole mission in which you have to identify your sexy sidekick, Meryl, who is disguised as an enemy soldier, by recognizing her backside, which Snake checked out upon meeting her earlier in the game. “I never forget a lady,” Snake tells Meryl after successfully identifying her.

“So there’s something you like about me, huh?” she asks.

“Yeah, you’ve got a great butt,” he replies.

Even so, the Metal Gear Solid series delivered certain incredible pleasures that no other video games have — pleasures that are difficult to isolate or define. It’s perhaps easiest to explain them in terms of individual moments. Like the mind-blowing moment, in the first Metal Gear Solid, when a floating psychic named Psycho Mantis shows off his psychokinetic powers by moving your controller: After you place it on a flat surface, at his instruction, the game uses the controller’s built-in vibration feedback feature to make it travel around. There’s the moment near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 when the events of the whole game are revealed to have been a virtual-reality simulation, and the no-nonsense colonel you’ve been taking orders from switches to a creepy robot voice and delivers a prescient monologue about the dangers of misinformation in the network era while the very interface of the game deconstructs and turns against you as your character runs around naked covering his privates with his hands. (Long story.) There’s the part in Metal Gear Solid 3 when, after a superintense boss fight with a 100-year-old sniper (again, long story), you climb a ladder for two full minutes, your elevated heartbeat slowing to a meditative pace as your feet clank on each rung.

The more that was revealed about Death Stranding, the more it began to seem like an entire game made up of such moments, in which you find yourself experiencing something you never expected you would in a video game — something you never even thought to want to experience in a video game, but you do, and somehow it works, and you are almost delirious with surprise and joy, and the experience lodges in your brain like a tiny meteor strike, such that every time you wonder at the mind of the person whose dedication to carrying out his ideas against all common sense gave you that experience, Hideo Kojima.

By the time I met Kojima in October, at his offices in Tokyo, I had played roughly 17 hours of Death Stranding, having received an early-review code two days earlier. It was one of the most fascinating and compelling but also frustrating and boring experiences of my long gaming career. In Death Stranding, you assume the role of Sam Porter Bridges (Reedus), a delivery man working in a postapocalyptic America that has dissolved into scattered communities in underground bunkers and cities. His is a treacherous job, because a mysterious event some years earlier — the Death Stranding — flooded the land with creepy humanoid monsters known as B.T.s, short for “beached things,” which appear whenever it rains and try to drag Sam down into a pit of black tar. Also, there are human terrorists and bandits. At the start of the game, Sam is tasked by the former president of the United States with reconnecting the country’s far-flung outposts via an internet-type technology called the Chiral Network. In order to do this, he must deliver supplies and equipment to the survivors, earning their good will so they’ll agree to join the network. For the rest of the game’s dozens of hours, you must deliver one load of cargo after another, fighting off the occasional enemies, human and B.T.

The plot of the game is preposterous, but its mood is not. The world of Death Stranding is like a depressed survivalist’s fever dream. It’s an unsettling mix of high technology, supernatural horror and pristine wilderness. The game’s vision of postapocalyptic America is a forbidding volcanic landscape of snow-capped peaks and mossy lava fields. Crystal-clear rivers testify to a near-total lack of civilization outside the angular gunmetal buildings that mark the entrances to underground cities and bunkers, where refugees hide out from the black rain. The game conveys the sense of a society both more advanced and more primitive than our own, where scattered bands of humanity struggle against forces of nature and death using superslick gadgets.

The process of gaining access to Kojima’s office had inspired in me a similar sense. In place of a reception area, there was a small white room with a round pillar at the center. A white panel on the left wall silently slid open to reveal a man in a black Kojima Productions T-shirt — this was Aki Saito, Kojima’s personal translator and the communications head of Kojima Productions. Through the door, I was greeted by a narrow hallway with a white, disco-style light-up floor and white walls that curved, tunnellike, into the ceiling. “This is what we spent all of our money on,” Saito said with a laugh.

The hallway, which bears a striking resemblance to the interior of the ill-fated spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” stands as a testament to Kojima’s twin obsessions of film and outer space. As a child, Kojima dreamed first of being an astronaut, then a filmmaker. He got his spacefaring dreams from watching the Apollo 11 moon landing and his filmmaking dreams from his father, a huge movie buff. His family had a tradition of watching a movie every night; by the time he was a teenager, he was making his own campy zombie movies with high school friends. It was only his father’s death, when Kojima was 13, and the family’s subsequent financial hardships that prompted him to seek out a career in the then-booming video game industry. In 1985, Nintendo published the original Super Mario Bros. Kojima was blown away by how the simple characters onscreen could convey a rich fantasy world. He became convinced that he might be able to fulfill his creative ambitions through game design, and the next year, he took a job at Konami.

We reached the end of the hall, and a door slid open, and there was a small woman with dyed pink hair in a large black hooded sweatshirt. This was Ayako Terashima, Kojima’s personal assistant; her fans know her as Touchy! on Twitter, where she has more than 50,000 followers and provides running updates on Kojima’s life. Tera­shima said that Kojima wished to show me a new trailer for Death Stranding that he had just edited. Saito and a Sony P.R. rep led me into a conference room with a long white table, tall-backed red leather chairs and chrome lights hanging pendulously from the ceiling.

Saito left, and a few minutes later he returned with Kojima. A youthful 56, Kojima walked in with rapid, precise steps and shook my hand. He was dressed in a light sweater and jeans. He had on thick, round blue plastic glasses; a scruff of beard lent him the nerdy-cool air of the intellectual aesthete. Saito, as he translated for him, revealed a dry sense of humor and a sort of mind-meld with his boss. He translated Kojima’s Japanese into English so quickly that to an unknowing observer, it might have appeared that Kojima was translating him.

I awkwardly presented Kojima with a bag of David Lynch-branded coffee, which I had bought at Whole Foods back home. I knew he was a huge Lynch fan; in talking about his preference for being directly involved in every aspect of the creative process, he once said he would “rather be a David Lynch than a Spielberg.”

Kojima grinned and thanked me with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm. “I’ve wanted this,” he said.

Kojima excused himself and went back into the office to prep the trailer. After a few minutes, Saito took me in. It was a large room full of white tables, around which sat dozens of people at PCs. Toward the center of the room was a large TV on a stand in front of a stylish open kitchen area. As Kojima sat down, he warned me that there might be spoilers in the trailer.

Boy, were there. Even after 17 hours of play, I had seen almost nothing in this trailer. I was surprised, given that reviewers had been explicitly forbidden to even mention anything that happened after the third “episode” of the game; with this trailer, Kojima was essentially planning to break his own embargo.

But spoilers be damned, Kojima was going to make the trailer he wanted. Among other things, Kojima is a pioneer of the video-game trailer. A trailer for Metal Gear Solid 2 is still renowned for the impact it made at E3 back in 2000. A second trailer, presented the following year, ended simply with the word “Submerges”; afterward, Kojima granted no interviews for six months, letting the clip speak for itself.

When we were back in the conference room, Kojima told me that the first inkling of Death Stranding came to him about 10 years ago, when he first learned about the phenomenon of mass stranding, in which dolphins and whales mysteriously beach themselves in huge numbers. He liked the phrase and also the image: creatures from another world, washed up on a beach. The idea returned a few years later and coalesced into something more tangible: a melancholy image of a man stranded. He approached the actor Norman Reedus, who had been slated to star in a horror game (later canceled) that Kojima had developed at Konami with the director Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro and Kojima had struck up a friendship during Comic-Con one year, and the director helped Kojima connect with Reedus, whom Kojima was a fan of from his roles in “The Boondock Saints” and “The Walking Dead.”

“Guillermo del Toro called me, and he said, ‘There’s going to be a guy that contacts you called Hideo Kojima, and he’s going to say we’re going to do a game together, and just say yes,.” Reedus told me. “I said, ‘Who is he?’ And he just said, ‘Say yes..”

The image of a stranded man had an added resonance for Kojima at the time. Earlier that year, he left Konami. “I was almost naked, starting a new company,” he said in our interview. “I had nothing, so I thought that that image fit perfectly with my image.” His split with Konami shocked the whole industry, and the reason for it has never been revealed; Kojima hasn’t discussed it, and his P.R. rep told me he wouldn’t answer questions about Konami. Fans and sympathetic bloggers filled in the gaps with a narrative that cast Kojima as the victim of a corporation’s soulless quest for profit, only further solidifying his reputation as an auteur. I was curious to know whether Kojima was trying to convey “the fullness of inner worlds,” as the New Yorker critic Richard Brody has written about the auteurs of film. Certainly Kojima’s games do seem to give people the sense of existing in his inner world. I asked him what of his life could be found in the game.

“I have always had this habit of feeling lonely,” he replied. “That’s why I create these things in the first place.” Kojima was born in Tokyo in 1963; when he was a year and a half old, his family moved away, eventually settling in the city of Kobe. He became a latchkey kid, he said. Whenever he came home to an empty house after school, he would turn on all the lights and the TV for company.

Television wasn’t just a distraction; he learned from it. He loved travel shows in particular, which taught him about the world outside Japan. Throughout our interview, Kojima expressed a desire for Death Stranding to offer a similarly edifying experience. He hoped Sam’s journey of reconnection might offer players a metaphor with which to understand a world he described as “coming apart.” “It’s not just America, but the problem with the E.U. in Europe, or the actual world, connected by the internet, where people are very lonely,” he said.

One of the most interesting aspects of Death Stranding is its multiplayer feature. Many games let you play along with other people, either killing them or cooperating with them or both. In Death Stranding, you don’t quite do either; the presence of other players is felt only indirectly, through items they leave that litter the landscape. You can help them by delivering cargo they’ve dropped, or by leaving useful items or buildings behind. As thanks, you can give other players “likes” for a well-placed bridge or ladder. As I walked around the landscape, littered with items labeled with other players’ names, I developed a sort of camaraderie with the pseudonymous players who always seemed to know what I needed for my journey. The traces of other players softened the game’s harsh solitude while heightening the sense of a longing for connection.

He clearly was worried about how Death Stranding would be received online. “It’s not really easy to swallow,” he said. But this was just as he intended: “I want people to feel, ‘What the hell is this?.” He suggested that the immediacy of social media exerts a kind of conservatism on popular taste. “Recently there’s social media, and people will kind of start a negative campaign,” he said. “They might say, ‘I don’t really understand it, I’m just stuck, so forget it..”

I asked about the criticism he received over the Quiet episode and over the Metal Gear Solid series’s treatment of women more generally. He seemed to acknowledge that his thinking had evolved, even while defending the way he did things in the past. “Entertainment moves on with the era,” he said, adding: “Of course, I can’t do the same thing today. The era is moving; it’s totally different.”

I should have pointed out that 2015, when Metal Gear Solid V came out, wasn’t all that long ago, but it was clear that my interview was almost up. Soon the Sony P.R. rep told me that there was time for only one more question. Kojima’s response had reminded me of a comment he once made about the timebound nature of video games. He had compared playing an old video game to driving a 30-year-old car — it would get you to your destination, but the ride wouldn’t be much fun.

This was a truth I had come to recognize when playing some of the old Metal Gear Solid games, whose inelegant controls and outdated graphics now significantly dampened the experience for me. I said that it was interesting he was trying to create an enduring experience through an artwork that, in 30 years, perhaps people would no longer find engaging.

“It’s not about making people play Death Stranding 30 years from now,” he said. “I just want to make them relive the memories they had, or the impression they had when playing for a long time.”

The interview was over. Saito handed me a bag full of Kojima Productions swag. Kojima rose, and I shook his hand and thanked him for his time. Then he was back out the door.

Throughout his career, Kojima’s work has confronted gamers with the question of why they play. Do you want to blow off some steam by blasting away a thousand alien soldiers while luxuriating in the most badass graphics you’ve ever seen? Kojima’s games may not be for you. Do you want to experience the singular creative vision of an uncompromising auteur while luxuriating in the most badass graphics you’ve ever seen? Well, you are probably already a huge Hideo Kojima fan. Welcome. Please don’t drag my article on Twitter.

One of the defining characteristics of all of Kojima’s games is their narrative ambition. Many video-game stories are perfunctory affairs; the only purpose of the plot is to give a basic motivation for the action. The Metal Gear Solid games, by contrast, try to convey stories of operatic scope and dizzying complexity. Your adventure quickly departs from the straight­forward hero’s journey found in many video games and descends into a labyrinthine techno-military conspiracy in which you never know if you are working for the good guys — or if there are any good guys at all. In the original Metal Gear Solid, you set out to infiltrate a decommissioned nuclear base in Alaska that has been taken over by terrorists, only to stumble upon a cover-up by the United States government, which has built a top-secret, nuclear-armed robot. The sequel’s plot hinges on a series of twists that successively reveal you to be a pawn in a power struggle among three competing cabals. Along the way, you meet a huge cast of characters with complicated back stories (cloning figures prominently).

In Death Stranding, the story is stripped down by comparison, the ambiguity of its narrative situations more subtle. On the one hand, your journey to “make America whole,” as the former president tells you at the beginning, seems synonymous with progress. You deliver the scattered survivors much-needed medicine, supplies and information. With each node of the Chiral Network you bring online, the surrounding area lights up on your map, and you can now power various useful installations there that help you along on your journey. But as the game goes on, the beneficence of your mission becomes increasingly uncertain. In one unsettling plot twist, a package containing a small thermonuclear device is slipped into an order of emergency food supplies. It appears on the manifest at the beginning of the mission, but you have no choice but to take it. As you draw closer to your destination, you feel a sort of helpless dread.

After my interview with Kojima, I spent much of the next few days sequestered in my tiny hotel room in Tokyo, playing Death Stranding on the cheap TV. Once I started guiding Sam along his journey, I found Death Stranding to be not as radically unfamiliar as Kojima’s prerelease hype had suggested. In many ways it hews to the popular conventions of the “open world” genre — a term that arose to describe titles like Rockstar Games’s famed Grand Theft Auto series, which tossed aside the linear levels of older games in favor of endlessly explorable virtual environments. As in the Grand Theft Auto games, I controlled a character from a third-person perspective and roamed free over a vast landscape. I advanced the plot by taking on mandatory missions, but I also could complete various optional secondary quests for additional rewards. I assembled an arsenal of weapons and gadgetry that slowly built my character’s abilities and opened up new ways to interact with the world. To someone watching my screen, it would have been possible to conclude that Death Stranding was basically a sci-fi version of Rockstar’s wildly popular recent open-world cowboy epic, Red Dead Redemption 2.

But there was something fundamentally new, I found as I continued to play. Death Stranding manages to transform an act that most open-world games take for granted — the act of traveling from one point to another — into a complicated and meaningful experience. Although you eventually gain access to vehicles, much of the time walking is your only mode of transit. In most games, walking is a mindless chore: You can watch the scenery go by, but there’s not much to do besides push the joystick forward. But in Death Stranding, traversing the terrain comes to feel like the core of the game. Walking Sam across the rugged landscape with a load of cargo teetering over his back requires a level of skill and concentration rarely found in games outside of combat.

For a porter, Sam is very unsteady on his feet. Every rock or dip in the terrain can cause him to stumble and fall. Going up or down steep slopes frequently results in a slide amid a shower of rocks and cargo. Sam will topple over in the middle of fording a river if his fast-draining stamina gauge runs out. In order to keep him from falling, you must constantly be ready to pull the left or right trigger, which makes him grab the corresponding strap on his backpack and jerk himself upright when his balance falters. The whole thing marvelously replicates the weight of a heavy physical load by mirroring it with a cognitive one.

Strangely, I found, this labor made me empathize with Sam to a degree that I had never experienced with a video-game character. I first noticed this near the beginning of the game, when I took shelter in a cave from a B.T.-riddled rainstorm. I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing; a marker off in the distance labeled “Port Knot City” seemed to be where I needed to go. I headed out of the cave and down a path that descended into a ravine. The path grew steep, and suddenly Sam began to pick up speed. His feet seemed to be running away from him down the slope. He pitched backward and waved his arms wildly for balance.

A blue indicator below Sam appeared, telling me to pull the right and left triggers on my controller to regain balance, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The path leveled out. Then it descended even more steeply, and Sam began speeding up again. His steps got shorter and quicker as he tried desperately to slow his pace.

The balance indicator appeared again, but before I could react Sam stumbled over a small rock and went head over heels in five jarring somersaults before regaining his footing and coming to a halt. The boxes I’d been carrying on my back had flown off during the tumble and lay strewn behind me, flashing ominously.

This left me minorly stunned. I had never tripped in a video game. I’ve fallen a lot: into pits in Super Mario Bros., off the top of a roof of a gutted apartment building in the online shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, off cliff faces in the treasure-hunting adventure series Uncharted. Because it’s self-inflicted, a fall is frustrating in a way that being killed by an enemy isn’t. But usually when you fall, you fall very far, to your death, and that means a restart. When Sam fell, the only injury was to my pride. I felt demoralized in a way that reminded me of when the handle comes off the grocery bag and your apples roll down the stairs: dull, but somehow all-encompassing.

One of the first missions forces Sam to carry his own adoptive mother’s corpse on his back. The load is so unwieldy that even a slight change in direction sends Sam stumbling. Again and again I came close to falling, and each time my heart leapt into my chest. I knew that if I took things slowly I would make it, but it was hard to break my ingrown habits. In most games, whenever you have distance to cover, you tend to run, especially because even the most realistic games usually let you sprint forever without becoming winded. I never was quite able to overcome this habit while playing Death Stranding, which meant that I tripped a lot. The game was turning my familiarity with video games against me.

I ultimately did fall with the corpse on my back, while impatiently clambering over some rough terrain. The rumble from the controller as Sam sprawled flat on his face sent a jolt of sickening horror up my spine. As Sam struggled to his feet, I took some small comfort in the fact that he had fallen straight forward, so the corpse didn’t actually touch the ground while he was carry­ing it to the incinerator. I was fully immersed in Sam’s bleak situation.

In our interview, I had asked Kojima about the unusually involved process of walking in the game. He said: “A game is basically not your normal day life. You’re supposed to be a hero. You’re super fast, or you can jump high, or you can fly. That’s the beginning of games, right? But in our game, it’s like a blue-collar worker. You have to watch your step, otherwise you fall, and there’s no character like that.”

He went on: “It’s like a normal self of yourself, where you have to balance, that saves the world. It’s totally different than the characters or the heroes that have appeared in other games. That’s my approach.” He said he wanted to make players ask themselves, “Why am I doing this?”

A few weeks after my visit with Kojima in Tokyo, I attended a launch event for Death Stranding in Manhattan. A hundred or so people assembled at a large exhibition space in Chelsea, making the whole thing seem more like the opening of a fancy conceptual-art show than the introduction of a video game. A replica of the white hall from Kojima Productions had been constructed at the entrance; snazzily dressed people sipped cocktails and wine. An entire wall was filled with photos of Kojima posing with famous people: Del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Robert De Niro, a whole array of Japanese celebrities. Dame Helen Mirren was in attendance, channeling Kojima’s cyberpunk-meets-postpunk aesthetic in a long black blazer with a Radiohead patch on the breast. I approached her and asked if she was a gamer.

“No, I’m not,” she said, shaking her head. (She was there because her husband’s son works for Sony Music and helped with the soundtrack.)

Kojima roamed the gallery wearing a black blazer over a T-shirt, black pants and black-and-white basketball sneakers. A small crowd was trailing him, including a personal cameraman there to document his every move. He stood for much of the night on an elevated stage, hamming it up with members of the cast as guests and media snapped their photographs.

When I was finally able to get close to him, I asked how he was feeling, now that Death Stranding had been revealed to the world. He smiled and jumped into a minute dissection of the reviews, which had been published a few days earlier. They were generally positive, though substantially less so than those received by any of the games in the Metal Gear Solid series. (Death Stranding has an 82 out of 100 on the review-aggregation site Metacritic, while the main Metal Gear Solid games range from 91 to 96.) Reviewers praised the subversive nature of the gameplay, the cinematic storytelling, the forthright tackling of political and social themes. It was clear that Kojima had an encyclopedic knowledge of the reviews as he rattled off facts about them: how many outlets gave it a 100, which one gave it a 35 and so on. He noted the high ratings in the European outlets but seemed slightly troubled by lower reviews in the American gaming press: IGN, the well-known gaming site, had given it a tepid 6.8 out of 10, declaring that the game was like “a frosted piece of glass; no matter how polished it may be, it’s still pretty dull.”

He had a theory about the relative difference between European and American reviews. “In America, they’re used to shooters, so they don’t gulp it down,” Kojima said. “It’s OK; everyone can evaluate what they want.” He noted that he saw a similar resistance to the stealth concept in the Metal Gear Solid games at the time. “In three to five years, we will see what people will say.”

Five years is practically geological time in the video-game industry, but then again, Death Stranding is a game that does not adhere to accepted time conventions. I played as fast as I could, forgoing almost all the side missions, reading barely any of the hundreds of emails you receive that fill in the plot, zooming from one delivery to the next, and it still took me over 60 hours to beat, well above the usual (30 to 40) of most big-budget open-world games.

And it seemed as if whatever pleasure I got was directly related to how much I personally struggled. About halfway through the game, there is a brutal section in which you have to make a series of deliveries in a mountain area covered in thigh-high snow. The snow makes walking excruciatingly slow. You can’t run. Sam walks with wide, sloughing steps, pushing against the snow, his face crystallizing in a mask of ice. For two hours straight, all I did was push my joystick forward with slight nudges to change direction as Sam trudged through the blinding white snowscape. It was beautiful, but given the total lack of challenge or stimulation, I felt my attention fading.

In “Hamlet on the Holodeck,” her classic study of computer-based narrative, the literary theorist Janet Murray explores the narrative potential of journeying through a virtual world. She cites the story of Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclops by getting him drunk and sneaking his men out underneath a herd of sheep. Games, she writes, can convey a similar drama of escape by using well-designed puzzles to trap players in space until they solve them. “Computer-based journey stories offer a new way of savoring exactly this pleasure,” she writes, “a pleasure that is intensified by uniting the problem solving with the active process of navigation.”

Sam’s journey reminded me of another character who is glimpsed briefly in the Odyssey: poor Sisyphus, rolling his rock up the hill. He, too, was involved in a struggle against the earth itself. Is it pleasurable? Well, as Camus would say, it’s all how you look at it: “The absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.”

Death Stranding had made me contemplate every exhausting step. At many points, I reflected that if I didn’t have to finish the game in order to write this article, I would have quit. But I’m glad I didn’t — because I would have missed out on one of the most beautiful and unsettling experiences I’ve ever had in a game.

It came during a mission in which I was tasked with recovering a machine that a paleontologist had been using to collect samples from a tar pit. The valley was wide and flat, pocked with gaping calderas that blew enormous plumes of steam into the air, like sideways clouds drifting into the sky. After hours of white and gray and blinding snow in the mountains, gazing on the relative liveliness of the valley, the dark green grass and mud and billowing steam pillars, was as revitalizing as an extra life. Then it started to rain. A swarm of B.T.s appeared, and I was dragged down into their nightmarish pool of tar by a gang of them. And so I died. It had happened a few times before, but each time was as terrifying as the first: The camera goes first-person, and you zoom through the tar like a water slide until everything goes black, and you find yourself looking at yourself floating underwater in a sort of limbo.

But when I respawned, there was a huge smoldering crater in the spot where I had died, about a mile wide and a quarter mile deep: a void left by my body. A bit shaken, I collected the paleontologist’s machine and headed back into the mountains. Turning the corner in a wide path, I heard a far-off rumbling sound. Three enormous boulders tumbled slowly down the side of the mountain. For a second I thought they were going to run me over, and I prepared to dodge out of the way, but they came to a stop just before me, as if mocking me.

The ups and downs of the previous hour or so, from the pit of boredom to the height of terror and down again to quiet, surreal beauty, had left me overwhelmed. This is not a typical feeling you get from a video game. Video games usually make you feel powerful. It’s film that makes you surrender to the spectacle on the screen. What makes Death Stranding a powerful experience is how it uses its agency-granting power to make you bored, or confused, or scared, or awed — to cycle you through a series of disempowering states, affecting you in a way that movies can’t quite accomplish.

After the boulders came to rest, I had the feeling of an eerie presence, something alive in the rough stone spheres that had come to rest in the snow in front of me. I felt as if my entire being had been slightly rearranged, at a molecular level. It was a classic Kojima moment.