10 Video Games That Are Based On Novels

Death Stranding is inarguably weird. I actually enjoyed it, but good god it is incredibly weird and, frankly, just a bit self-indulgent.

So it'll come as no surprise that one of the weirdest goddamn authors I have ever read in my stupid life was in fact a key influence for Hideo Kojima during the initial development of Death Stranding.

You might be unfamiliar with Japanese author Kobo Abe, but his short story/novella Rope was a direct inspiration for Death Stranding's core idea/mechanic of creating and maintaining connection rather than attacking and creating further distance between ourselves.

As far as Abe is concerned, Rope is actually pretty straightforward - that is in no way suggesting that it's an easy read when compared with the work of other authors. My suggested jumping off point for his longer works would be The Box Man. A novel in which a man decides to live in a mobile cardboard box and writes his musings on the inside of said box, which is in fact the narrative you, the reader, are reading. Scribblings inside of a cardboard box.

Yes, that's the jumping off point. I cannot make it clear enough how mental all of this dude's stuff is.