Metal Gear Survive is far and away one of the strangest games to be released in this or any year. It positions itself as a spin-off or side-story to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain—one of the best games ever made—and you likely wouldn't believe its premise if I told you. Lucky for you, I'm gonna tell you anyway! Metal Gear Survive is what happens when the prologue of Metal Gear Solid V—an attack on a mercenary army's offshore base of operations—is interrupted by a portal to hell opening up and sucking you and a bunch of other soldiers into it. This hell-dimension is called Dite, and the bulk of the game involves you, a nameless soldier, trying to survive in Dite—a barren wasteland crawling with zombies. That's...pretty much it.

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Despite the absurdity of all this being delivered to you with a deathly straight face, the sheer effort with which Metal Gear Survive contorts itself to fit into the narrative of a much better game isn't nearly the weirdest thing about it. That it exists at all is an even wilder. Metal Gear Solid V was, ostensibly, going to be the last game in the series. That was the presumption when the creator of Metal Gear, Hideo Kojima—one of a mere handful of game designers whose name is known by the people who play their games (partly because he puts it everywhere)—had a falling out with his publisher, Konami. Kojima was fired before the game was done, his name was scrubbed from the cover, and the Metal Gear series never really got a proper ending.

With Kojima gone, it seemed like Metal Gear was, too. It's dishonest to act like any one person is the sole creative force on a game—artist Yoji Shinkawa, designer Shuyo Murata, and countless others have helped make these games the landmark work they are today—but in the public consciousness, Kojima was Metal Gear. And there was nothing like Metal Gear.

In a medium that, at times, can seem void of ideas, Metal Gear had more than it knew what to do with. It used the absurdity of video games—an absurdity it actively cultivated, with literal potty humor (characters shitting their pants was a recurring gag), jokes that broke the fourth wall to screw with the player, and a tendency to indulge in eye candy—as an excuse to indulge in philosophical diatribes about the nature of war and existence.

Where the primary language of blockbuster video games is violence, Metal Gear labored to make it optional, while exploring the ways violence is inflicted on the masses that don't involve the barrel of a gun. In 1998, it posited the danger of memes—viral ideology as a means of fomenting dissent. 2001's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty explored information as violence, how its ebb and flow gives select few power and withholds it from others—the power of fake news. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was about patriotism, the ways it is warped and wielded to turn good people into instruments of cruelty. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots ruminated on economics, how the profitability of war demands that we always be at war, funding armed conflict by proxy. And Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was explicitly about the culture war, how ethno-nationalist sentiment is, in some ways, a new, slower-moving nuclear bomb threatening to engulf us all.

Depending on where you stand, this makes the existence of Metal Gear Survive, and its utter lack of ideas, either darkly funny or downright insulting. Maybe it's a little of both. Most likely, it's just pragmatism.

As an industry, video games have had a strong self-conscious streak about whether or not they are "art." It's a weird debate to have; few creative endeavors are more nakedly commercial than video games and it shows: individual studios, let alone designers, are rarely afforded the opportunity to have their names associated with games, no matter how popular. You know how many studios worked on Star Wars Battlefront II? Three: one for every component of the game (multiplayer, single player, and all things regarding spaceships). You know how many studios make Call of Duty games? Also three—Treyarch, Infinity Ward, and Sledgehammer Games have a three-year alternating schedule, so publisher Activision can have a Call of Duty game hitting stores every November. And if your studio becomes famous—like BioWare—odds are it'll become a brand name attached to multiple shops by your publisher, leaving your reputation spread thin and close to meaningless. The games industry isn't built to value idiosyncrasy and expression. It's built to swap out parts and keep the engine running.

It's a miracle that Metal Gear lived as long as it did, and got to be all the things it was, and that the quiet man behind it achieved any level of fame at all. Hideo Kojima does not publicly speak in English often, nor does he really speak much at all outside of a select few well-known interests. They are, as his Twitter will attest to, mostly food and sometimes La La Land. He doesn't really talk about games, or his personal life, or much of anything else outside of cryptic teases for his first big post-Metal Gear game, *Death Stranding*—which no one knows anything about other than the fact that it stars Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, and Guillermo del Toro and features a lot of imagery revolving around ecological disaster and male pregnancy. In other words, Hideo Kojima is doing fine.

Metal Gear, however, has died—with a game ironically (or fittingly?) subtitled Survive, full of the shambling, reconstituted remains of what it once was. It is anti-art, a corporate salvage expedition, a game that trades trafficking in ideas for the busywork of maintenance. It's hard to imagine a more cynical game arriving in all of 2018. Survive is literally the very thing it asks you to fight—a zombie made from the parts of Metal Gear Solid V. It holds you in its thrall by giving you countless meters to stress over: one for hunger, one for thirst, each of those affecting your health and stamina. If you eat raw food or drink dirty water, you risk illness—another meter that you'll have to watch tick down. Survive is defined my scarcity: of resources, of ideas, of narrative.

Honestly, I kind of like it. Metal Gear Survive is a pile of tangled systems, discrete goals strung together with concrete rewards. I can get good at Metal Gear Survive. I can learn it, and win. It's a video game, one that works as video games are intended to. Of course this is how Metal Gear ends—as the video game it never was.