Hear me out: Death Stranding is essentially Hideo Kojima’s American Truck Simulator, a Hideo Kojima game. I’ll try and justify that in a minute, but the actual substance of this news is that there’s a free weekend for American Truck Simulator now underway, as well as some deep discounts on the game in promotion of its recently-released expansion.
The free weekend on Steam will let you play as much American Truck Simulator as you can handle for the next three days. If you like it, you can buy the full game at 75% off until November 14, which brings the price down to $4.99 / £3.74 / €4.99. Most of the DLC is discounted right now, too, except the brand-new Utah expansion.
Now, if you’re wondering why you should care about ATS, here’s my argument: it’s the perfect way to hold you over until Death Stranding’s PC release next summer. They are both games about making deliveries across large, lonely expanses of American terrain. They both require you to carefully manage your cargo – larger loads will make the journey more difficult by making your avatar more challenging to control.
For full disclosure, I have not yet played Death Stranding, so maybe I’m stretching for all this because it’s Thursday and I’m feeling punchy. But people who have played Kojima’s latest have also made the comparison – Death Stranding reviews from Giant Bomb, VentureBeat, and LADbible all reference SCS Software’s truck sim series. If I’m crazy, so are they!
Not convinced yet? Sam Porter Bridges wears a trucker hat. Checkmate, atheists.
There are other great free PC games and truck games out there, but I don’t know why you’d play those when SCS just made Death Stranding free for the weekend.