Death Stranding was the first full game I ever reviewed for Digital Trends.
It was 2019 and I’d just started contributing to the site as a freelancer focused exclusively on Destiny 2 guides and DLC reviews. I was only a few months in when my editor asked if I’d be interested in critiquing Hideo Kojima’s latest game come November. I enthusiastically accepted through the safety of a text chat, but I was a little terrified in real life.
Despite writing about games for well over a decade in some form, reviewing them for blogs when I was in high school even, it still felt like a daunting responsibility. I’d be one of the first people to write about what I knew would be an important entry into video game canon. My voice would represent Digital Trends. It was a routine assignment, but the stakes couldn’t feel higher. It felt like all eyes were on me.
I found myself reflecting on that moment earlier this month when my review code for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach hit my inbox. That email came with no anxiety attack attached, as I’ve reviewed countless games for Digital Trends since 2019. These days, I get an assignment like this, start my download, and get to work without thinking about it. A once nerve-wracking process has become second nature to me. But this time, I stopped before punching my code into my PS5. How have I changed as a critic since Death Stranding’s release?
To properly reflect on that, I’d have to revisit my 2019 review – something I just couldn’t work up the courage to do.
To be transparent, I’ve never really liked my Death Stranding assessment. I was proud of it in 2019 because it was my major review for a site as high profile as Digital Trends, but it was a critique born from a self conscious moment. I worried too much about whether my opinion would be right or wrong, wondering if a lukewarm take would out me as a fool who had no business assessing games for a large publication. I agonized over my opinion and would focus instead on how divisive I felt it would be. It felt like an immediate cop out, as if to remove my voice from the equation. It was Schrödinger’s game: It could either be good or bad until you put the disc in.
What I didn’t do so much at the time was engage with what Kojima was actually trying to communicate to players. I made references to the fact that it was about connecting a divided America and noted that the social features stressed how much easier life is when we’re on the same page, but so much time was spent treating the review like a book report. The acting is good. The visuals look great. The controls are interesting. There wasn’t much substance to any of it; it was like I was assessing a laptop. What was the point of writing about it, let alone playing it at all, if I wasn’t absorbing anything from it?
To strengthen my approach to reviews, I’d have to change the way I thought about games. I wondered why I was so hesitant to interact with them the same way I do any other artistic medium. I could talk your ear off about the camera work in Citizen Kane and what it establishes about Charles Foster Kane at every juncture of his life, but I wasn’t thinking about the minutiae of game design the same way. Why not? Surely these decisions aren’t random. Something as simple as The Last of Us’ crafting system communicates something about the world. It tells us that resources are scarce in an apocalyptic world that’s been cleaned out by scavengers. As elementary as something like that is, that marriage of play and message is what makes games so special.
I’ve spent the last six years following that thread and seeing where it leads me. I stopped approaching games as products to be evaluated on a checklist and began focusing on how effectively they communicated something to me. Fun became secondary to function. It’s how I found myself loving Pikmin 4, a game that practices what it preaches about the joys of organization by turning Pikmin’s classically chaotic strategy gameplay into something tidy and streamlined. It’s why I lambasted The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s roguelike mode, an addition that I felt spat in the face of the base game’s mediation on cyclical violence. It’s why Despelote is one of my favorite games of 2025, towering above glitzy games 1000 times its size. I don’t just want games to distract me; I want them to speak to me.
My criticism has improved thanks to that, sure, but what’s more important is that my relationship to games has deepened too. They are no longer toys that I forget about the moment I put them down. I find myself more engaged with everything I play, always analyzing and interpreting rather than hyper focusing on immediate thrills. That has opened my mind up to games that I would have written off earlier in my life. I would have dropped something like The Banished Vault back in the day after failing to find the “fun” in its oppressive survival systems, but now I’m more easily able to appreciate how its antagonistic nature creates a tone that mimics the merciless nature of its world (read Dia Lacina’s phenomenal review). I’ve learned to embrace friction as a communication tool, something I wish I was more open to when initially reviewing Death Stranding in 2019. After all, the slapstick comedy routine that comes from trying to navigate uneven terrain makes the moments where the community bands together to build a road that much more meaningful. While a job like this can often leave writers entirely burnt out on games, I find myself more in love with the medium with each passing year.
It has been my goal in the past few years to inspire that feeling in anyone who reads a Digital Trends game review. Gaming is an evolving artform and I believe that the way we talk about it needs to change to meet that transformation. It now feels hollow to praise a game simply because it has hyper realistic graphics and 100’s of hours of content. What emotions do those games inspire in us? What do they tell us about our world? How do they challenge us in ways that go beyond physical skill? Those are the conversations I want to have more often whenever a game like Death Stranding 2 releases.
I’m not writing all of this to try and dictate what a video game review should look like or how we talk about games. If you take anything from this, let is be that art demands different perspectives. It asks us to be open-minded, to challenge ourselves, to have confidence in our instincts. It is not a pop quiz to be aced. There is no objectively correct take. I wish I had a better handle on that in 2019, or at least trusted myself a little more back then to stand firm in my interpretation. Maybe Death Stranding 2 isn’t really that much of an improvement over its predecessor; maybe I’m the one who really changed.
