Games

Delivering Pizza Is the Best Part of 'Death Stranding'

The optional pizza delivery missions are a perfect distillation of ‘Death Stranding,’ and they come with a fantastic reward.
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Image: Sony

Death Strandings best moments are small and quiet. It has a heavy plot thick with metaphors and cinematic flair, but Death Stranding soars in the contemplative moments. When I sat at the top of a mountain and scanned the horizon, charting a path; when I came across a ladder left by another player that would save my life; when I sat panting on the ground after a rough encounter with BTs, those were the moments I loved most. To build more of those moments, Sam needs to deliver packages, and the best package to deliver is pizza.

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Don’t avoid those pizza missions. Seriously. There’s a bunch of tips out right now about how to play Death Stranding and none of them mention the high speed pizza delivery missions. This baffles me because A: they’re the best content in the game and B: they pay off in a big way.

After you clear Chapter 2 and make it to the Central Region and Lake Knot City, Sam will start taking on more side orders. One of these will be an urgent delivery for a fresh pizza for a man named Peter Englert. Englert lives in an odd location off the beaten path, does not want to join the Chiral Network, and makes strange demands.

Of all the side content in Death Stranding, Englert’s pizza delivery missions are both the most challenging and most rewarding. He always wants the pizza hot and fresh, which means the missions have a time limit—between 30 and 60 minutes. The pizza’s box must stay flat and undamaged, thank god for container repair spray.

Englert calls for pizza four times and each time, the distance I traveled to deliver the piping hot ‘za was a little longer. Each time I got a little more frustrated. “Why am I doing this?” I thought, as I trudged through water and avoided package hungry human marauders. “What’s the point of this,” I wondered as I skidded down the side of a snowy mountain, pizza in tow.

The answer is simple. The delivery is the point. I did it because pizza is delicious and no one should be denied its pleasure simply because the barrier between life and death is busted and ghosts wander the land. I did it because Death Stranding is fun to play and the pizza missions gave me more of what I loved—time spent traveling between places while I felt lonely among architecture left behind by other players.

So don’t skip the pizza missions. They may seem frustrating at first because Englert never seems to reward you properly. But they pay off. That last pizza delivery is a big deal, one that requires finding a hidden location and a massive trek across the map. But delivering the final pizza gave me a nice reward, one that filled in some blanks of the story and provided me with equipment that made the game’s final act a little easier.

Death Stranding is a long game and there’s more side missions than you’d ever want to finish—literally hundreds. But deliver those pizzas. Trust me.