10 EXACT Moments Video Game Fans Tapped Out

2. Princess Beach - Death Stranding

There’s a certain amount of twisty-turny, yet inarguably compelling melodrama that you’re signing up for when you agree to let Hideo Kojima take you down the rabbit hole of one of his video game narratives.

Death Stranding is certainly up there with his most bizarre and divisive games to date and while I am absolutely a Death Stranding apologist, there is a point in the story even the most diehard and accepting fans had to say, “Well this is all getting a bit silly.”

Toward the pointy end of the already wildly convoluted narrative peppered with characters that have names like Fragile and Die-Hardman, you find yourself on the foreshadowed beach that links the living and the dead.

All of this is fine, except when you are speaking to your sister Amelie about linking herself to the chiral network and Sam is for some reason compelled to say, “So I’m Mario and you’re Princess Peach?”. As if that wasn’t cringey enough, she suggests you run home across the beach together, and I quote, “like Mario and Princess Beach.”

Because they’re on a beach. Get it? Yeah. They also run in slow motion. It’s a moment that’s very hard to get on board with even for fans who’ve swallowed the entire story so far.