Death Stranding

Kojima Productions' 2019 game is about walking, and it is entirely serious about that. America has been broken apart by an event that made rain age whatever it touches and the dead dangerous to the living, and Sam Porter Bridges reconnects it by carrying cargo. The systems are all about the load: weight distribution shifts your balance, terrain is modelled closely enough that a river crossing is a real decision, and ladders, ropes and vehicles are placed by you and shared asynchronously with other players' worlds through the strand system, so the road you find half-built was made by strangers. That mechanic - competitive-free multiplayer where the only interaction is helping - is the genuinely novel thing here. Combat exists and is the weakest part. The story is long, sentimental, occasionally self-indulgent and has a cast including Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Léa Seydoux. People either bounce off it in two hours or finish it and cannot stop thinking about it. The Director's Cut adds a firing range and a racetrack.