Death Stranding is a very strange game in oh-so-many ways. Perhaps one of the strangest is the game’s obsession with including really garish product placement throughout.
For instance, when you go to your private room to rest and shower and make grenades out of your bodily fluids (Number 1 and Number 2 grenades, get it?) there’s a table covered in Monster Energy Drink cans. You can drink these to replenish your stamina.
Actually, even when you’re not in your private room, one of the consumables you drink out making deliveries is Monster Energy Drink, though you keep it in a canteen. It’s . . . weird. I find it very immersion-breaking and a little gross.
There’s more, naturally.
When you have Sam (Norman Reedus) go to the bathroom “sitting down” (gotta make those Number 2 grenades!) the doors to the shower/toilet enclosure shut and on the outside there’s an advertisement for Ride With Norman Reedus on AMC. That’s Reedus’s motorcycle reality show, for those who don’t know.
So now we have an ad with Reedus’s face on it, promoting a TV show he’s on while playing a game where not only is he the star, but his likeness is used.
It’s a very strange thing to see while playing a game about the end-of-the-world with a bizarre but still fairly serious story. Honestly I’d find this odd in any kind of game. I realize there’s product placement in other video games–and certainly Kojima’s past titles–but rarely have I ever seen anything quite so brazen.
I suppose one could wave it away as “edgy” or even satirical, and I’m sure Hideo Kojima fanboys will make every excuse.
I just find it off-putting and unnecessary. It smacks of compromise–compromising an artistic vision in order to make a little extra scratch.
Then again, look at how pretty those Monster Energy Drink cans are. They’re so lifelike! You can almost taste the chemicals just looking at them.
