Why this month’s PC port of Death Stranding is the definitive version

Enlarge / We're not allowed to talk at length about those Valve-specific segments just yet. (credit: Kojima Productions / 505 Games)

For some video game publishers, eight months between a title's console launch and its PC port would be galling. In the case of Death Stranding, on the other hand, that timeframe is astonishingly fast.

The peculiar, critically acclaimed game, and first from industry vanguard Hideo Kojima after his departure from Konami, emerged in 2016 as an apparent PlayStation 4 exclusive. That was the operating assumption for some time, considering Sony rarely ports its console exclusives to PC, but we'd seen hints to the contrary, and the publisher was bold enough to announce the PC version a mere week before the game's PS4 launch. The whole thing felt like a dare to PC gamers: will your Kojima fandom make you cave and buy a PS4 early, or can you wait until Summer 2020 to strap a naked baby to your post-apocalyptic chest?

In my case, an eight-month wait for the PC version was easy to stomach. I had plenty of other games to catch up on, and the prospect of a higher-performance romp through Kojima's United Cities of America tided me over.

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