Like I would honestly recommend Death Stranding to someone who has "video game burnout", or maybe even depression. For example, I think I've found more enjoyment in things like reading or cooking since playing the game. It's like it's rewired my brain or something, man.

It can be so hard to describe what's appealing about the game because so many people find one or two aspects fun, or they find everything fun, or maybe it even depends on where they're at in the story. But the true appeal of the game is taking it upon yourself to find the fun.

That's why a lot of people, myself included, don't have fun with Death Stranding right away. Its beginning section isn't designed to feed you fun through a funnel like you can't feed yourself. Death Stranding is fun with the training wheels off.

The Kojima mascot, Homo Ludens, embodies this idea. It symbolizes humanity discovering fun. This isn't conjecture, it's all laid out in the memory chips. Fun was originally something we discovered. A stick, a hill, a ball, these things were not fun by nature, we created fun things to do with them.

It's made us dependent on the instruction. When we don't get the appeal of a game, we blame the developers. And that's not to say they're not to blame, but we expect the things we have fun with to be inherently fun. There used to be a time where we had to MAKE things fun.

Someone's opinions can sprout from the Bible, but using the Bible itself to justify said opinion is not empirical evidence. It's just a logical fallacy, you could call it appeal to faith, but I'd argue it's moreso appeal to authority. "The Bible says X. I'm a Christian, so I must believe X."

And all this time I thought he couldn't swim in Pikmin 1 and 2 because he was too heavy!

A lot of my co-workers say, "Have a nice REST of your day," specifically to avoid this response.

I can't describe the feeling it provoked. Jealousy? Inspiration? Lust? All I could think was, "damn so that's why her legs are so thick."

Very evil people in the White House this week. They smile and snicker.

Ominous ゴゴゴゴ

Many of these multiversal interactions seem to be spontaneous and unspectacular, often making it go over people's heads. Why, it's even possible that Sam has gotten help from other Sam's and hasn't even realized it. That's kind of the whole point of the chiral network, isn't it?

The Cyberpunk references lean greatly into this idea, as the e-mails from J (Johnny Silverhand) outright say that Sam's world IS NOT HIS. He acknowledges how the technology in Sam's world is futuristic, but not the SAME future. Cyberpunk's is more advanced, but they can't take advantage of chiralium

Well, in Death Stranding, there is scientific evidence of a multiverse. The Beach is proof of it. Everyone has their own Beach, but lapses in space-time can send you to other Beaches. In this way, franchises can connect to Death Stranding either as fiction or reality, or even both.

But when you get the Gravity Gloves (a direct reference to Half-Life: Alyx), they claim to have found the blueprints in an underground laboratory with a λ logo. Clearly they found it at an actual Black Mesa facility. But if Half-Life is fiction, then how?

Let's take the various Valve Easter Eggs as an example. We know from the e-mails that the games existed in this world. There's various characters like Benjamin Hancock and William Lake that acknowledge Half-Life as a fictional series, even saying that Sam is rumored to be a huge Half-Life fan.

It also looks like it's absolutely not officially licensed JoJo's merch. So yeah, kinda plagiarism.