Death Stranding Director's Cut

An outstanding horror tale

- Alex Blake

£34.99 FROM 505games.​com NEEDS macOS 13.3 or later; Mac with an Apple M1 chip or later

Death Stranding Director’s Cut has finally arrived on the Mac, and Hideo Kojima’s opus does not disappoint. It’s truly a masterpiece of unsettling world-building and patient, multi-layered gameplay.

The game is set in a supernatural future where the Death Stranding has blurred the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. Unless properly incinerated, dead bodies become BTs (Beached Things). These ghostly monsters consume the living, triggering a void-out blast that can flatten cities. Your character, Sam, can detect BTs with the help of a scanner called an Odradek. As a porter, your task is to deliver supplies to remote outposts of civilisation, a job that gradually morphs into the grand project of rebuilding America itself.

Death Stranding’s lore is one of its most fascinating aspects. Toxic rain called Timefall heralds the presence of BTs, and anything it touches rapidly ages in a matter of seconds. Your Odradek connects to a Bridge Baby (BB), a foetus that was removed from the body of a brain-dead ‘still-mother’, allowing it to bridge the gap between life and death and thus sense BTs. The world of Death Stranding is weird, unsettling and deeply engrossing. It’ll grab you from the moment you start.

Terrifying territory