To play a Hideo Kojima game is to be assaulted by “design” at every moment. Often, this expresses itself in an unparalleled love and commitment to some of the sickest mechanical design you have ever seen. Intermittently, it feels superfluous and impractical, a bit like a Hypebeast-y affect. Both of these realities are contained within Death Stranding’s shower handles, which look sick as hell and which I am almost positive would suck to use.
Before I continue I would like to stress that I am aware of the absurdity of critiquing the shower handles in a game haunted by oil ghosts. That said, I have an immense love for a good shower handle. Finding the perfect water temperature is important, and doing it with a bad shower handle can feel like cracking a safe. It may seem frivolous, but I’m the kind of person who loves a durable, sleek, solid-feeling physical interface, be it a knob, lever, potentiometer, slider, or switch.
To Kojima Productions’ credit, the shower handles in Death Stranding 1 and 2 look fun to switch. They appear to be rocker switches: long, binary on/off switches labeled H and C. This has not changed between the two games as far as I can tell, but the gusto with which Sam slams the H handle in 2 (UPDATE: According to a poster on Reddit Sam sometimes hits the cold switch depending on your location) is far more robust. The camera locks in on it, and it hits with a satisfying “ker-chunk.”
(The shower in Death Stranding is seen here for the first time at 1:08:18)
This is sick as fuck and would drive me insane if I ever encountered it. This is because its design appears to be binary. There are precisely four settings for the shower: off, cold, warm, and hot. This is less than ideal as far as showering is concerned. It’s possible that finer adjustments are feasible and Sam just likes using scalding hot water, which would be in keeping with his character. But these temperature settings are not ideal for everyone in this world.
I attempted to find out if there were extended lore conversations in either game about the nature of the handles or the shower itself, but could find nothing save for explanations about how the combination shower/toilet ambiently extracts Chiral crystals. If such a conversation does exist, I imagine it sounds like this:
Deadman: “[Bedeleebeep] Sam, your shower is equipped with Chiral empathy sensors that preemptively scan your α brain waves to maximize aquatic relaxation while cleaning. No need to make finite adjustments. Just keep that in mind when getting squeaky clean.”
But I would like to give Kojima Productions credit for a massive quality of life improvement, by moving the combination shower/toilet out of Sam’s room. I don’t agree with combining them to begin with, but having the shower in the bedroom was clearly having negative consequences on Sam’s mental state, as is evidenced by the sheer number of traumatic cutscenes that occurred in that shower.
The graver sin, however, was that its placement was kind of corny. If you’ve ever been in an upscale hotel, there’s a chance you have stumbled on one of the worst fancy hotel tropes: the shower with a window that lets you see your roommate bathe. This has always felt bizarrely intrusive while masquerading as cool, a solution to a problem that nobody had. Thankfully, Sam’s accommodations have been upgraded, but the shower handles still feel indebted to this impulse. It’s a design that you’d see in a high end hotel that would initially seem cool but would be wildly impractical if you actually had to use it.
A big part of designing a sci-fi world that’s engaging is novelty. Often this leads to making machines that are wildly impractical. Death Stranding 2’s three-wheeled Tricruiser is sick as hell but realistically looks like if you redesigned a slingshot to kill its driver instantly in any collision. A sky monorail where the driver hangs on the front is not a practical way to move freight, and yet I’m amused by it. But occasionally you’ll hit a choice that feels too tony, a future cobbled together from products found in fancy hotels and boutiques. It is in these moments where the universe of Death Stranding feels less like a realized world and more like a collection of influential friends and products that would look beautiful on Instagram.
In the grand scheme of things, there are more important things to focus on in these games than the shower handles. But that said, if I came home from a long day Portering, I’d prefer the tried and tested practicality of some knobs.
