if you follow me on bluesky, you might be privy to the fact i’m writing a death stranding essay. and by “writing,” i mean struggling to write. this is not that essay, even if it would be very funny if it was. that would be a good bit. no, this is just something small i’ve been thinking about and now is probably the best time to get it down as i stare into the void that is my professional future. so here we go: my favorite landmark in death stranding is a rock that looks like godzilla.

the rock sits on the horizon and slowly grows as one travels from a major hub known as the distribution center south of lake knot city to a timefall farm growing wheat past a nearby tundra and a weather station a little ways away up the mountain. this rock, as i said before, looks like godzilla is looming over the next hill and waiting to make you a snack. fortunately, godzilla is my friend, so instead of unleashing a deadly ray of atomic energy, the rock simply indicates that i’m on the right track. it’s a hopeful rock, not a monster that acts as a stand-in for nuclear weapons, but it looks like the monster, and that makes me smile.

the death stranding elevator pitch is you play as a guy who carries a bunch of stuff on his back from shelter to shelter in a post-apocalyptic united states. while you eventually earn better equipment for easier hauling, not to mention the ability to drive motorcycles and trucks, transporting goods through hostile environments remains the name of the game even as it introduces other, more dangerous obstacles. as such, learning to spot familiar features in the world around you becomes a necessary skill, not only for surviving back-and-forth shipments but also getting them done in a reasonable amount of time.

death stranding has a rhythm. at various points in the game, you’ll enter a region, map out the major shelters to which you’ll be delivering goods, and spend the next couple of hours trekking from prepper to prepper. build a strong enough relationship with these folks — modeled after celebrities like late night host conan o’brien and horror manga icon junji ito — and they’ll join the united cities of america, a new government hoping to replace the destroyed united states using a data network capable of sending information at lightning-fast speeds via the afterlife like a kind of purgatory-powered internet (yes, really). once you make enough progress in one region, you’ll typically be given a job that takes you to another a decent clip away, and the cycle begins anew.

one of these long trips near the middle of death stranding ranks among the most brutal slogs in the game but also its most beautiful, taking you along a rushing river that eventually turns into a breathtaking waterfall before you turn back into the mainland between a large, grassy plain and a mountain. the only problem is that at this point in the game, you’ve also probably become pretty reliant on motorcycles to get around at a decent clip, which makes the multi-tiered, rocky terrain around the waterways a nightmare to navigate. rather than get off the electric trike and hoof the rest of the way on foot, however, i found a pretty reliable route that allowed me to carry huge loads before the eventual establishment of vital infrastructure like roads, bridges, and ziplines.

and that’s where the godzilla rock comes in. the death stranding map is a confusing mess of too-much information, and so i usually find myself using landmarks rather than plotting trips on the provided topological interface. i can watch the pillar rise into the sky and tell myself, “okay, i just head west here and my job is almost done.” nothing too deep to read into here. if you thought i was going to tie this into a larger emotion or takeaway, i apologize. sometimes you just like a rock and want to tell people about it. play death stranding and send me pics of the godzilla rock so i don’t have to turn the game on every day to get my fix of the godzilla rock. thanks for reading. godzilla rock forever.