Higgs' design being completely changed for Death Stranding 2 is so funny to me. Dude's defeat and lengthy stay at the beach knocked him out of his dark moody emo phase straight into becoming freaky cybernetic rockstar Joker
so i went into Death Stranding the same way i go into most AAA games: with plenty of story spoilers, but absolutely no gameplay spoilers. and DS throws a surprising number of complications and flavor into its otherwise straightforward gameplay; i 1000% underestimated how much effort went into shaking up the long-haul deliveryman routine. genuinely, it never gets boring for me.
anyway here's the expression i made the first time i ambled into MULE territory and heard the distant rev of a fucking car engine
I think it’s narratively brilliant and tragic that Higgs ends up likely spending the equivalent of eternity in isolation when growing up in pain and isolation is certainly what made him malleable to the E.E.
and of course the other layer of tragedy is that he managed to crawl out of that childhood hell, still fucked up inside but willing to try living and connecting with others; the first rebirth.
even so, something would always be missing.
that missing part of his soul festered like an open wound, and was exploited.
the story of Death Stranding is on a planetary, likely cosmic scale. but Higgs and Amelie and the concept of extinction in this game also seems like a personal, human metaphor for the internal debate that happens in many people during suicidal ideation.
I think Higgs in DS2 is depicted as absurd as he is to contrast his previous catastrophic, suicidal nihilism. absurdism is arguably the ultimate antidote for nihilism.
maybe something happened to him on The Beach that triggered a second “rebirth”, and he went even more insane in an absurdist way, not in a “mass murderer who sees himself as a mercy killer/angel of death” way. so he possibly circled back around to being a kind of anti-hero.
but who knows how this fits into the still murky and mysterious lore…?
You ever think about how Sam and Higgs are reflections of each other? Like purpose wise. Sam was raised by the E.E. As a way to stop extinction. Higgs was manipulated by the E.E. As a way to ensure extinction. It was just a “who’s going to win?” Situation while the E.E. Sat back and could rest on her laurels that “it wasn’t her choice” because someone “made her” do it.
I'm not the only person who, upon starting the Higgs fight and going to equip my strand, noticed that the penis was still equippable and proceeded to try and whip it out in front of Higgs, right?
Like, Sam wouldn't do it. I wasn't even surprised Sam wouldn't do it. But it was there, so I had to try it.
I am not typically into hero/villain pairings but Samhiggs is something else. They were both used by a superhuman entity destined to bring about the end of the world and tricked into playing particular roles in her plan of resolving her own indecisiveness. There is hardly anyone in the world they can relate to except each other.
Also Higgs Monaghan lived in a yandere basement. I guess that's also worth mentioning.
Death Stranding showing that healing isn’t a linear process is so important. Like we see Sam slowly learning who his “safe” people are and letting others touch him, we see him finally opening up as much as he can, and then in an instant we see that all shatter at the end, tossing him back several steps. He pushes people away and he has to rebuild his progress. It’s also neat to see him trusting only specific people to touch him, rather than accepting all touch right away. It’s not a one and done it’s a process - and a slow one at that