The “pretend you won” option in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a small, but radical little choice. It pops after you fail a boss fight and lets you skip the encounter entirely with a brief text explainer telling you how things would’ve unfolded if you won. You might get a lower ranking or miss one or two non-essential scenes for choosing this option, but there’s no judgment, no restrictions, no downside to bypassing something frustrating and choosing to engage with the parts of the game you really like. It’s a brilliant, elegantly simple design choice, and I would be far less keen to keep playing Death Stranding 2 without it.
I’m not saying this as someone who hates boss fights in video games or who usually struggles with them, either. I beat Messmer in Shadow of the Erdtree before FromSoftware nerfed him, and I liked it.
I like Death Stranding 2’s bosses as well, on a conceptual level. They’re evocative encounters made all the more impressive by how Kojima Productions turned mechanically straightforward moments into memorable set pieces. They are basic, though. If you strip away the emotive music, the sound effects, and the unusual influences some of these enemies have over the environment, you’re left with the equivalent of a standard boss fight from any mid-2000s 3D game. A small arena is home to a big boss with maybe three attacks, and you attack it, run away, and repeat. That’s it.
The redeeming feature of Death Stranding 2’s boss fights is that they’re spectacles with an integral role of the story, not just encounters thrown in as progress checks or to give you something to shoot at. Take the tutorial boss fight, for example — the Giant BT that appears in the middle of Deadman’s recorded message for Sam. Sure, the idea is to teach you how to handle giant enemies, but it’s also another disruptive moment for Sam following a string of unwanted interruptions and emotional turbulence.
His time with Lou is interrupted at the start of the game. The appearance of Beached Things in the region interrupts his trip home. He (sort of) reunites with Deadman, and the arrival of the Giant BT interrupts that as well. You have to wait to hear the rest of Deadman’s message until you deal with the boss, after that message cuts off at a cliffhanger moment. While I appreciate the thematic unity of all the interruptions, I don’t want to replay the same boss battle several times just to see what Deadman had to say.
“Maybe it’s a skill issue,” you say, and sure, fine, I’ll admit it. I’m not the best at correctly timing a dodge after the camera decides to lock onto the sky or when Sam randomly takes ages to recover from a hit and can’t evade an incoming instant-death attack as a result. There’s never enough depth in these fights to make replaying them with a different approach enjoyable, either, and any spectacle wears thin after a while.
And that’s exactly why Death Stranding 2’s “pretend you won” button is such a good, necessary choice. As enjoyable as some of these battles can be under the right circumstances, this is not a combat game. It’s a vibes game and a story game best played at your own pace. I’m perfectly happy soaking up the atmosphere of a boss fight and appreciating its position in the of misery that is Sam Bridges’ life once, maybe twice, before moving on, and thankfully, Kojima Productions respects my time enough to let me go when I’m ready.
