5 Games To Say Goodbye To June With

Play it on: PS5
Current goal: Start repairing connections

Oh, hi. It’s me again. So after wrapping up some much-needed venting through the perilous violence that is The Last of Us Part II, I’m gonna need to wind down and start envisioning a reparative future. And thank heavens Sam Porter Bridges has just such a task ahead of him.

I came to adore the original Death Stranding after a few playthroughs. It’s a dense piece of video game fiction if there ever was one, and there’s so much I still don’t understand about it, but in a good, mysterious way. I look forward to a new chapter of this wonderfully weird, sometimes too weird, Kojima fantasyscape.

The first Death Stranding did a remarkable job of fusing large, real-life themes such as human connection to its own wonderfully outlandish concepts like extinction entities, using them together to explore how our efforts to defy or control death can lead to unexpected consequences. That’s exactly the kind of thoughtful, stimulating, grounded yet escapist thing I need right now given what’s going on in my life and frankly, given the horrors of our world, too.

Hideo Kojima has repeatedly spoken about how he had to rewrite Death Stranding 2 after the pandemic, this time with a script that’s more focused on asking, “Should We Have Connected?”

It’s a question I’m asking myself a lot. I don’t know if Kojima’s going to give me the kind of answer I want to hear, but I’m certainly in need of spending some time in his mind right now to think about it. — Claire Jackson

And that wraps our picks for the weekend! Happy Pride and happy gaming!