Death Stranding
Kojima Productions' supernatural sci-fi courier sim is an unprecedented journey across beauty and dispair
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Decima Engine + Kojima's fantastic imagery + excellent Photo mode... I thought it'd be easy. I was wrong. Death Stranding's interactions are limited, you know, <<it's hard to form connections when you can't shake hands>>. The combat is unrepresentative of the game's soul and I could never shoot Sam using a rifle. The CAs are incredibily hard targets to capture in dramatic poses. Most meaningful characters, like Fragile and Mama, never really appear in-game, only in cut-scenes or inside a bag. The vistas are sublime but they are meant to surround you and they hardly deliver in an isolated frame. There is a ton of concepts that I left undeveloped, or that once developed I wasn't satisfied with. But across these 24 shots, selected from about 600, I hope you could re-live the many moods and thrills of Death Stranding: the journey, the horror, the fatigue, the calm and the tension, death and undeath, birth and rebirth, love and loneliness, wonder and desolation.
As always on Vertical Gaming Photography, post-production for this gallery was kept to a minimum: RED DEAD CETACEAN's green strip was desaturated by a few points because it was a bit too flashy. BIG FISH required dozens of almost identical shots to try getting both Sam and the whale in the right place at the right moment; at the end, I decided to combine Sam from one shot and the whale from another. Lastly, wen I reviewed NO SAM'S SKY at the PC, I realized Sam was not perfectly centred, so I adjusted the shot symmetry.
No Post-Production (ingame Photo Mode only): THE MAN WHO DELIVERS, PASSION OF THE PORTER, MONSTER HUNTED, CHIMNEY SWEEPER, BUSY RIDER, END OF THE LINE, BORDERLANDS, JUMPING JACK THEFT, CAT SURPRISE, CLIFFHANGER, NO MORE HERO, BAY OF THE TENTACLE, IN COLD LOVE, FULL STOP, TALLER THAN LIFE, 1917, WAR BEHIND, DEATH STRANDED, UNGER GAMES, RAIN MEN, TOMORROW IS IN YOUR HANDS
Minor Post-Production: RED DEAD CETACEAN (local color adjustment), NO SAM'S SKY (alignment adjustment)
Full Post-Production: BIG FISH (2 shots combined)