Death Stranding Is No Longer The Only Strand Game
When I mentioned that I’d been playing a new strand game, indie developer Strange Scaffold’s Witch Strandings, in TheGamer’s Slack, I got all manner of reactions. Fellow features editor Eric Switzer revealed that he regularly asks developers of triple-A titles if their games are strand games, editor-in-chief Stacey Henley argued that Pokemon Legends: Arceus’ satchel retrieval made it a strand game, and one colleague who shall remain nameless earnestly asked whata strand game actually is.
They had a point though, what is a strand game? The first port of call is Hideo Kojima himself, the man who coined the term and created Death Stranding, which up until recently was the only strand game in existence. “DEATH STRANDING is not a stealth game,” he says in his initial tweet revealing the genre. “It is brand new action game with the concept of connection (strand). I call it Social Strand System, or simply Strand Game. [sic]” Understand the concept now?
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While Kojima is being characteristically cryptic about what a strand game actually is, Witch Strandings developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. told Kotaku that he believes there are three core pillars to the strand genre and connection is none of them. The first principle is the concept of nurturing, and the fact that your main goal is to take care of the world you inhabit, or at least improve it for others. Death Stranding is, at its core, about connecting people and communities, and Nelson believes this to be of equal importance to the strand concept as any connection between players’ games.
The second of Nelson’s strand principles is transportation, which seems fairly obvious, but goes deeper than you may
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